Island of the Swans (2 page)

Part 1

1760–1767

Here lived the lovely Jane
who best combined
A beauteous form to a
superior mind

—
Sir John Sinclair

One

E
DINBURGH
, O
CTOBER
1760

P
ERCHED UNCOMFORTABLY ON A LOW STOOL IN THE DRAFTY SITTING
room, the young girl stared miserably at the wrinkled scrap of embroidery lying forlornly on her lap. Refusing to look at her mother, Jane Maxwell angrily stabbed her needle into the clumsily stitched letters that proclaimed “She Is A Joy Who Doth Obey.”

“Jane!” said Lady Maxwell crossly, pointing to the threads that ran at decidedly odd angles across the soiled fabric. “’Tis impossible to sew properly if you dinna stretch the piece upon your frame. You’ll take out every
word
, missy,” she said in an exasperated tone, “until you do
it perfectly
!”

Voicing her reproach at her ten-year-old daughter’s failure to master yet another of the feminine arts, Lady Maxwell retrieved Jane’s crumpled sampler and sighed audibly as she examined it more closely.

“You haven’t made a bit of progress since yesterday, lass. In fact, ’tis
worse
! Were you up to no good with Thomas again when you should have been at your needlework?”

Jane’s silence confirmed her guilt.

“Every daughter of mine will show prospective suitors she has mastered the art of being a
lady
!”

“But, Mama—surely I shan’t have to marry someone as dreadful as Daddie for years and years!” Jane retorted vehemently.

“Impudent chit!” Lady Maxwell snapped. “A mother has only to
blink
and she has a spinsterish lass on her hands. Now, I want you to sit on this stool till you’ve restitched the entire line!”

A rebellious flush flooded Jane’s cheeks as she bent over her embroidery, her hands clenched.

“I
hate
it and I won’t
do
it!” she muttered under her breath.

“
What
did you say?” Lady Maxwell inquired, her eyes growing hard.

Looking up at her mother’s glowering features, Jane swallowed her pique.

“I’ve no talent with a needle, Mama,” she corrected herself carefully, “and ’tis so hard on you to be bothering with such a hopeless seamstress as I.”

“You’ve only been trying with half a heart,” her mother replied, unmoved by Jane’s entreaties. “By the time I return from my morning calls I expect you to be finished with it, do you hear me?”

Lady Maxwell stalked out of the chilly room before Jane could protest any further. In the three years since baronet Sir William Maxwell had deserted his wife and daughters in favor of his ramshackle holdings and estate-bottled whiskey in Monreith, south of Edinburgh, Magdalene had attempted to rule her middle daughter with a firmer hand. She had launched a campaign—fruitless, so far—to mold the mutinous lass into a highly desirable young lady capable, one day, of catching the fancy of a suitable gentleman of means. It was the only route open to her as a respectable, albeit lowly and impecunious, member of the Scottish aristocracy.

Lady Maxwell’s eldest daughter, Catherine, was sweet but plain, as anyone with eyes could see, and there wasn’t time to wait to see how wee Eglantine would mature. Yes, a proper match for Jane as soon as was seemly could rescue them
all
from the wretched, genteel poverty in which they now lived, a poverty surely deepening with each passing year and bottle of whiskey Sir William consumed.

By the time she’s sixteen, Jane will marry well!
Lady Maxwell vowed to herself.
I will show that drunken sot of a husband he cannot ruin Magdalene Blair of Blair!

She attempted to calm the throbbing in her temples—a sensation that plagued her whenever she contemplated the abusive treatment and shocking lack of funds she had endured at the hands of that cursed man. However, all was not lost. Jane, thank heavens, showed unmistakable signs of becoming a beauty!

Sweeping her threadbare skirts past the front door and into the dark, narrow alley called Hyndford Close, Lady Maxwell offered her hand to the strapping bearers poised to assist her into her hired sedan chair. The household might go without meat for days at a time, but nothing would stay her from making her morning calls in a suitable conveyance. Magdalene relaxed against the worn upholstery, as she was borne in and out of the traffic clogging Edinburgh’s High Street, and closed her weary eyes.

Suddenly, she was startled by the cacophonous sounds of clanging church bells and cannon fire rumbling eerily through a maze of narrow streets and alleyways that fanned out from the entrance gates of Edinburgh Castle, high above the city.

“Not to worry, madam,” cried one of the sedan chair bearers over his shoulder. “’Tis the six guns of the Argyle Battery! Have you ever heard such thunder in your life?”

“I’ll wager George the Third can hear this clamor all the way to London town!” muttered Lady Maxwell sourly. For her, the noisy commemoration of the twenty-two-year-old king’s unanticipated ascension to the throne of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales held absolutely no excitement as her own domestic troubles claimed her complete attention.

Lady Maxwell stared absently at the clear autumn sky. She sought solace in the fact that Jane continued to show signs of developing into an appealing wench, even if her manners were atrocious. She realized that her hoydenish daughter would rather climb the back fences of Edinburgh or browse among the bookstalls on the High Street with that neighborhood waif, Thomas Fraser, than acquire any of the feminine charms that would eventually provide a secure future for her. However, Lady Maxwell had a plan to remedy the problem. She tapped her fan against the stained velvet curtain that shielded her from the riffraff traveling along the busy thoroughfare. She would soon put an end to her daughter’s devotion to that pleasant but penniless orphan.

A small stab of guilt pricked Lady Maxwell’s conscience, as memories of Thomas’s brotherly kindnesses toward Jane and her sisters during these difficult years floated through her mind. However, a mother had her duty, and unless something drastic was done, the task of keeping Jane and Thomas apart would soon be nigh impossible. Thomas was plainly fondest of Jane, and her middle daughter had utterly ignored all of her mother’s pointed instructions as to the appropriate behavior of young ladies.

In fact, Jane’s near legendary willfulness was the subject that preoccupied Lady Maxwell as the sounds of cannon faded and the normal clatter of town activity resumed. Feeling utterly overwhelmed by unpaid bills owed the fishmonger, the pub master, the seamstress—just to name a few of her most pressing creditors—Magdalene Maxwell turned over the few possibilities open to her as her sedan chair bearers threaded their way among the foot and wheeled traffic. Plastering a grim smile on her lips, she prepared for the first of several duty calls on aristocratic mothers of eligible sons who might one day trade their titles and wealth for Jane Maxwell’s fair hand.

At the bottom of the stone stairs, Catherine Maxwell stared at her younger sister with a mixture of apprehension and awe.

“I think we should go back, Jane,” she ventured nervously as thirteen-year-old Thomas Fraser hailed them from the far end of the cobbled alley behind their five-story dwelling in Hyndford Close. “Mama will lock you in the attic if you don’t finish that line on your sampler.”

“Pooh!” Jane dismissed her with a wave of her dainty hand. “Mama will be hours making her rounds. Hullo, Thomas, what’s that in your hand?”

“A little souvenir of today’s coronation,” he replied slyly, waving a torn piece of parchment. “Want one for yourself?”

“Aye… let’s show that King Geordie what we think of ’im in Scotland!” Jane declared, ripping down several pieces of an official-looking placard from the stone wall above her head, and dancing a jig on them with her scuffed brogues.

She looked triumphantly at Thomas Fraser, her companion in crime, who grinned his approval, while Jane’s two sisters stared, open-mouthed, at the young vandals’ daring.

The three Maxwell sisters and the spare, hollow-cheeked boy trod stealthily along the stone wall nearest them and peered out from the dark shadows of Blackfriars Wynd at the retreating figure of Edinburgh’s Chief Constable Munro. They watched the officer stroll down the walled city’s principal road, carrying a sheaf of newly printed broadsides under his arm. The posters he had been distributing throughout the city proclaimed the coronation, this twenty-fifth day of October 1760, of George III, King of All Britons.

Jane, her brown eyes glinting with mischief, looked around Blackfriars Wynd cautiously. Standing on tiptoe, the youngster grabbed another of the elaborately lettered coronation notices off the granite wall that faced the worn stone stairs leading to the local wigmaker’s shop. She thrust the detested parchment into the hands of her young male companion, who promptly tore it to shreds. Together, Jane and Thomas stamped furiously on the remains until they had trampled the proclamation to bits.

“Och, Jane! The constable nearly turned around!” gulped Catherine Maxwell, the eldest and invariably the most cautious of the quartet. “I thought sure he’d spy you this time!”

“And what if he should?” Jane demanded. “He probably feels the same as we do! Thomas says that fat Hanoverian’s no king to us Scots. Charlie’s our true sovereign—’tis so, Thomas Fraser, now, ’tisn’t it?”

The gaunt, shabbily dressed lad merely frowned at Catherine and leaned against the stone-paved arch. As far as most northern Scots such as young Thomas Fraser were concerned, the late George II was a brute and his recent demise was suitably ignominious: he had collapsed in his water closet earlier in the week from a stroke brought about by his fierce exertions in that most private of chambers. Few Highlander families such as the Frasers, who had failed in an attempt fifteen years earlier to restore the Stuart dynasty to the throne, mourned his passing, nor did they look forward to the coming reign of his baby-faced grandson, George III.

A shaft of sunlight filtering through the shadowy passageway transformed Thomas Fraser’s distinctive dark red hair into the color of aged burgundy. His ruddy skin was free of freckles, thanks to the legacy of a Roman ancestor. And if the boy hadn’t been so thin and undernourished, his prominent cheekbones and gray-green eyes would have made his young face quite handsome.

“’Tis not child’s play, what we’re about!” Thomas said ferociously to his female audience. To dramatize his point, he yanked down another placard affixed to the wool merchant’s shop. “’Tis an action ’gainst that English swine who dares call himself king!”

Suddenly, Jane clapped her hands excitedly. “You’ve just given me a grand idea!” she said, a wicked gleam in her eye. “A pig race! Let’s have a pig race!” she exclaimed. “We havena had one in
such
a long time—and ’twill be a fitting
tribute
to our new king, don’t you think, Thomas?” she added impishly, tugging on his sleeve as she composed her expressive features into a look of feigned respect.