Joan Wolf (2 page)

   And so Frances was sent to Lochaber. She had Highland blood in her, and had responded instantly to the majestic beauty of Castle Hunter and its surroundings. The castle was old; it dated from the thirteenth century, although it had been added to in succeeding generations. The main floor was chiefly occupied by the Great Hall, which had been built as a royal hunting seat in the thirteenth century. It was a mammoth room, with walls of stone and a floor of ancient tile.

   By the time Frances came to Castle Hunter, it had belonged to the Macdonalds for centuries and the Great Hall was used mainly by the children for indoor play on rainy days. The real living quarters were on the first and second floors. The rooms were not elaborate, the Macdonalds had always been Jacobites and Catholics and consequently had never had very much money, but their home was charming, with its seventeenth-century white paneling and comfortable, tasteful furniture.

The real beauty of Castle Hunter lay in its location. It stood on an island in the clear waters of Loch Leven, connected to the shore by a stone causeway. From the castle’s small windows, which looked as if they had been burrowed through its thick stone walls, one could look out upon the towering heights of Ben Nevis and the wild mountains of Lochaber.

Douglas’s memories of Frances were all connected with Castle Hunter. During the week that followed his visit to her in London, she was constantly in his mind.  Not so much as she was when he had seen her in her aunt’s drawing room, but as he remembered her from the past.

He had been home from Cambridge when Frances first arrived at Castle Hunter. Douglas’s father was Lord Lochaber’s brother, and Douglas had come to stay with the Macdonalds when his father had gone off to India with Lord Cornwallis. Then his father had died, his mother had remarried, and Douglas had ended by staying on at the Castle. Lord Lochaber’s death two years previously had made no difference to his status. Lady Lochaber regarded him as another son, and had sent him off to Cambridge with Charlie and Alan.

   The three of them were at Castle Hunter for the summer holiday the year of Frances’s introduction into the Macdonald clan. She had been such a sweet child, Douglas remembered, gentle and tender and trusting. She was her parents’ only one, and clearly they had not suffered the winds to blow ungently upon her. Her mother’s death had shaken her, but the deep security they had given to her had not been pierced.

And she was lovely. Douglas remembered vividly the feelings of tenderness and protectiveness the rosy-faced child who held her head like a flower on a stem had provoked in him. He had wanted to guard her, to walk before her to remove each little stone that she might have dashed her foot against. She had spent most of her time with him.

And then Ian came home from Eton. At fourteen, he was tall, arrogant with adolescent superiority, and alight with the flame that made all those who stood beside him look only half alive. Frances had thought he was wonderful. To twelve the age of twenty is awesome, but fourteen is magnetic. Without a qualm Frances dropped Douglas and gravitated to Ian. He, not unflattered by her obvious adoration, had with casual possessiveness annexed her as his chief follower. They were always out, either on foot with the dogs, on the loch, or on horseback over the lovely, lonely hills.

Against Douglas’s careful, tender guardianship, she had chosen Ian. He was wild and reckless and had never guarded anything in his life. He plunged her into physical hardship and, often, physical danger. He bossed her and teased her. He regarded her as his.

The years had passed and every summer Frances had returned to Castle Hunter. Lady Lochaber was very fond of her and, since Frances was always beautifully polite, had allowed her to go her own way. Her own way had, invariably, been Ian’s way. And Ian went uncurbed.                                  

   Douglas, whose feelings for Frances had only deepened with time, was an interested onlooker of her life. The first real indication of a change in her relationship with Ian had come the summer she was sixteen. Ian, now eighteen, had been allowed to join the family in the main dining room when company was present, and Lady Lochaber had broken her own rule and had said Frances might come downstairs as well. The occasion had been Charlie’s arrival with an English friend, Lord Henry Talbot, a young man the same age as Charlie, twenty-five.

For the first time Frances had worn her hair up. Lord Henry had not been able to take his eyes off her all during dinner. Charlie, who hadn’t seen her in two years, was having the same trouble. Frances had not noticed. She conversed with meticulous courtesy with the gentlemen on either side of her, who happened to be Ian and Alan. Her cheeks had been flushed and her eyes bright with the pleasure of her first grown-up dinner party.

Ian had noticed the reaction of his brother and his guest. On one or two occasions he had caught their gaze and both had been startled by the expression in those dark eyes. When they joined the women in the drawing room Ian had gone directly to where Frances sat, stood behind her, and, with lordly possessiveness, placed a hand on her shoulder. It was a picture that remained vividly in Douglas’s mind, that image of Ian standing behind Frances, with the firelight illuminating the thick fall of his dark hair and his dark, challenging eyes.

   There was one other picture from that summer that Douglas remembered clearly. It had been the end of August. Frances and Ian had ridden out toward Glencoe earlier in the day, when Sir Donal had unexpectedly arrived at Castle Hunter. Douglas had volunteered to find Frances and let her know her father had come.

The pass of Glencoe was a haunted place. Douglas had always felt that the savage betrayal of the massacre, when a company of Campbell soldiers had put to the sword the Macdonald clan who had housed them with sacred Highland hospitality, had imprinted itself on the landscape. The precipitous rock faces that surround the pass were like a savage army of gaunt peaks, scarred by bleak ravines. The place was heavy with brooding melancholy, even in the sunlight of a fair August day.

The girl and boy whom Douglas sought did not seem to be aware of any unpleasant atmosphere. They were standing near the great flat rock that heads the glen. Instinctively Douglas pulled his horse up. The picture they made, with the mountains of Beinn Phada, Gearr Aonach, and Aonach Dubh as their backdrop, was stunning enough to cause him to want to capture it in memory. He watched them for a moment, with a painter’s abstract eye.

As Douglas looked on Frances shook her head at something Ian was saying to her. In response he laughed and pulled at the ribbon that was tying back her hair. It gave, and the heavy shining mass of it swung loose. The girl snatched at the ribbon and as she turned toward him he caught her shoulders. Frances had grown quite tall, but she had to tip her head back to look up into Ian’s face.

He said something to her, and then, as Douglas watched helplessly, his mouth came down on hers and her head tilted back so that her hair fell in a curtain of pale gold over the arm that had pulled her hard against him.  Her own arms went up to circle his neck.

Douglas dug his heels into the sides of his horse and rode forward. They moved apart slowly at his approach. Frances’s eyes were like emeralds. Ian’s face looked both fierce and wary. He kept Frances’s hand in his. In the end Douglas had not said anything, and they had returned together to the castle.

It was Alan’s death the following year that had driven a rift between them. Frances had been at Castle Hunter when word came in early August that he had fallen in the Battle of Talavera. He was five years older than Ian, and had joined the army when he left Cambridge. He had been in the Peninsula for only six months.

Lady Lochaber was distraught. The rest of the family sincerely mourned for Alan, but she seemed inconsolable. Ian loved his mother, and when she had begged him to promise her he would stay out of the army, he had done so. It was a promise he almost instantly regretted.

Douglas had sympathized with him. All his life Ian had planned to join the army. As a younger son, it was one of the few professions open to him. He was a Roman Catholic, so there was no family living waiting for him as there was for so many of the younger sons of the English nobility who belonged to the Church of England. His religion also barred him from representing his family constituency in the House of Commons. And while Ian was hardly a deeply religious person, he would as soon have thought of changing his religion as changing the color of his hair. He was a Macdonald of Lochaber, and the Macdonalds of Lochaber had always been Catholics.

 And so what was left for him was the army or the law.

   For Ian it had always been the army. It was a profession for which Douglas had always thought him well suited. He had the instant, unreflecting courage of all great soldiers, as well as the kind of personality that commanded instant admiration and respect - an invaluable quality in an officer. Furthermore, he was interested in international politics, and Douglas and he had talked for many hours about Britain’s intervention in the Peninsula War.

   Ian was a Scot, a passionate believer in individual liberty and the rights of all nations to rule themselves as they chose. Napoleon’s invasion of Spain was, to his mind, indefensible. Both he and Douglas had agreed that the freedom of Spain was well worth fighting for.

Only now he would not be fighting. A Cambridge career and the law were the only goals left for him. He did not find them attractive. And Douglas, watching sympathetically, saw another frustration arise for Ian. For the very first time, Frances was against him.

The problem with detachment, Douglas often reflected, wryly, was that you tended to see all sides of an issue. He understood and empathized with Ian. He also saw Frances’s point of view with compassionate comprehension.

Alan’s death had jolted Frances profoundly. She was not deeply interested in causes or ideology, and her knowledge of what was happening in Spain and Portugal was limited. She knew Ian was going to join the army, but she had not thought much beyond the vision of him dressed in regimentals and looking magnificent. He had been shrewd enough not to dwell upon his ardor for war in her presence.

But Alan was dead. Douglas would always remember her expression in the weeks that followed the message from the War Department. The childlike, trusting look he had loved was gone. In its place was a gray look of worry that had drained the youth from her face. The look had gone only after Lady Lochaber extracted that promise from Ian.

When Ian turned to Frances for understanding, he got only a face of stone. The romantic haze had cleared from before her eyes and she saw the future in the cold, sunless light of reality. “You’re no good to me dead on some battlefield in Portugal,” she had said to him brutally within Douglas’s hearing one day. “The law is a perfectly good profession. We can live quite comfortably on my money and on what you make.” And, finally, out of her fear and out of her youth, she had given him an ultimatum. “I won’t marry you if you become a soldier.”

Now Ian had succeeded in getting himself thrown out of Cambridge. There would be no career in the law. He was determined, Douglas knew, to force his mother to release him from his promise. He had always been her favorite son. He was confident she would give in. And, knowing Ian, Douglas was also sure that he thought he could win Frances over. In the past she had always done what he wanted her to do. But Douglas, remembering that austere and somber look he had seen on her face, was very much afraid those days were over.

Chapter Three

To see her is to love her,

And love but her for ever,

For nature made her what she is,

And never made anither!

—
ROBERT
BURNS

The season of 1810 was remembered in the social history of London as the year Frances Stewart made her come-out. In succeeding years the story of the impact she made on the sophisticated London ton would assume proportions that were almost mythical. The reality was astounding enough, as Douglas Macdonald often thought, when he heard it talked about in future years. He had been there and watched it all, the private drama as well as the public success.

   It began at the ball given by her aunt, Lady Mary Graham. Lady Mary had a house in Hanover Square and, as the wife of Frances’s mother’s only brother, she had graciously offered to introduce her niece into society. Lady Mary was English, the daughter of an earl, and very well established in society. Her marble hall was filled as Douglas, dressed in evening attire, came in the great front door. There was a rainbow of color, the sound of expensive fabrics rustling, the scent of many different perfumes, and the noise of chatter. Frances stood with her aunt and uncle on the wide landing at the top of the stairs, greeting her guests as their turns came to be presented.

Douglas never remembered what she was wearing, only that it was white and fell gracefully about her tall, slim figure. Her ash-gold hair was caught in combs off her face with just a few tendrils allowed to escape and curl on her cheek. Douglas felt an ache at the back of his throat as he looked at her.

“Douglas!” There was a flash of very white teeth as she smiled at him. “It’s so nice to see someone I know,” she said sincerely.

“I don’t think you will lack company, Frances,” he answered dryly.

She held his hand for a minute longer, then the major-domo boomed “His Grace the Duke of Grafton and Her Grace the Duchess.” Frances turned to greet them, and Douglas passed on to the Reception Room. The crystal chandeliers were ablaze with light and the French windows, which faced the garden at the back of the house, were opened. Viscount Winburton, who had preceded Douglas through the line, turned to him, “Did I hear Miss Stewart say she knew you?”

“That’s right,” Douglas replied calmly. “Since she was twelve years old, in fact. I’m Douglas Macdonald and I live with the Macdonalds of Lochaber. Lady Lochaber is Miss Stewart’s godmother.”