Island of the Swans (24 page)

Jane’s voiced trailed off as Peter Ramsay placed another short snifter in front of them. The innkeeper shot Alexander a quizzical look and walked away.

“I can tell you miss him very much,” Alexander said quietly.

“I will
always
miss him,” Jane answered fiercely. “I still can’t really believe he’s gone… that he will never come back… that I will never see him again.” Jane looked down at her glass helplessly. Silent tears edged her lashes. “I’m sorry…” she said in a wan voice. “I keep thinking I’m getting better, but I guess I’m not.”

“Yes, you are,” Alexander countered, taking her gloved hand in his. “You laughed a little this evening, and you were brave enough to come out with me, a stranger.”

“But when I do those things. I feel
terrible
!” she exclaimed suddenly. “Thomas is lying in some muddy grave near a river whose name I can’t even pronounce, and my mother says ‘Cheer up, lass… on to the ball!’”

Alexander gently stroked the soft doeskin of her white glove with his forefinger.

“I know… when I lost someone I held dear, I felt guilty too—and angry at the same time,” he said quietly.

“Angry?” she asked. A strange look passed across her furrowed brow.

“That
he’s
dead and
you’re
alive. That he
left
,” Alexander said softly.

Tears welled up again in her dark eyes, luminous in the dusky glow of the tallow tapers standing in the wall sconces.

“I
am
angry! I’m angry at my mother! ’Twas she who thought she could make a
better
match for her darling Jane. And I
hate
that Simon Fraser…” Jane’s bitterness seemed to fade into despair. “Catherine says ’tis wrong of me to keep blaming everyone, but you know who makes me angriest of all?” she asked, staring at Alexander.

“Who?”

“Thomas,” she whispered. “He let it
happen.
I didn’t want him to leave.

Simon Fraser spirited him away to keep us apart, and but ’twas
Thomas
who gave in to it…” Jane added a dash of venom to her pronouncement. “He was trying to please
everybody
—but look what happened!”

The anguish in Jane’s voice struck a deep chord in Alexander. Her story had a depressingly familiar ring to it. Bathia had come from solid, respectable people. When Alexander had learned she was carrying his child, he had thought seriously about marrying her. He had loved her, he knew that. No one had ever made him so happy, so capable of dealing with the burdens of his dukedom. But he had shrunk from the conflict their attachment created with his mother and Staats Morris.

“Bathia Largue is a sweet thing, and we shall be forever grateful to her for nursing you back to health,” his mother had said, “but surely, Alexander, you can appreciate she’s certainly not at all a suitable match for a
duke
!”

For a while he had fought against their reasoning, their pleas, their threats. But in the end, Jane was right. He had bowed to the pressure to “please” his mother and stepfather. He had been forced to ignore the fact that Bathia had never left his bedside when he himself had been so ill with ague. And she had willingly given him her virginity. She had been hurt terribly when they didn’t marry, and eventually, he began to wonder if she would continue to love him at all. Women of his acquaintance often withdrew their affection if they didn’t get what they wanted. Bathia, however, had died within days of the birth of their son. He never discovered whether
he
could learn to trust the one woman who had offered such enduring love. By trying to please everyone except Bathia who
deserved
to be pleased above all others, he had lost the one thing he’d ever wanted. And until this night, he had believed there could be no other woman in his life, ever again.

“I’m angry at Thomas for
dying
,” Jane said, her voice interrupting his gloomy reverie. “Did you feel that way when Bathia passed away?”

“So, you know something of my past as well,” he responded, smiling sadly at Jane’s tear-filled eyes. “Two bruised hearts are here tonight, are they not? Well, yes… I suppose I was very angry when Bathia died. But most of all, I was angry at myself for not being strong enough to do what I felt was right.” He lifted his hand from Jane’s and, with the back of his finger, brushed away the moisture that had spilled down her cheeks. “I don’t think I’ll make
that
mistake again,” he said, lightening his tone.

“But as least you have a wee bairn to remind you of her. You retain a precious part of her!”

Jane said it with such fierce longing that Alexander overcame his surprise that she should know about his Geordie.

“So ’tis all over Edinburgh, is it?”

“Not exactly… but people do talk.”

“And does such licentious behavior shock you?” His voice had an edge to it.

“No… I’m envious.”

Her answer startled him so much he nearly choked on his brandy.

“It doesn’t offend you that I have a bastard bairn in the nursery at Gordon Castle?”

“Don’t ever call your child that!” she said sharply.

“All right… I won’t. He’s a fine wee thing.”

“Handsome as his father?” she said teasingly.

“Aye… handsome as the Devil himself,” he grinned, patting her hand for emphasis.

His touch was comforting. She liked the way his slightly gaunt visage filled out when he smiled at her.

“What rock-hard fingers you have, lassie,” he joked, pinching her gloved hand lightly in wonder. “Whatever have you been doing? Planting turnips all winter?”

Jane’s brief smile vanished and a deathly white cast came over her features.

“That’s not my finger… ’tis a piece of ivory,” she whispered.

Why, oh, why, just when she was feeling a bit cheerful, did something like this have to happen?
she wondered bleakly.

“Ivory? What are you talking about, lass?”

Jane put both hands on her lap under the table.

“Remember the day of the pig race on the High Street?”

Alexander nodded, smiling at the memory of a ten-year-old Jane throwing a fit in the mud puddle like an enraged duckling after she’d come up the loser.

“Well, your fine linen handkerchief probably saved my life,” she said, avoiding his eyes. “Right after the race I reached for an apple from a moving cart and, instead, tore off my finger. Thomas ripped your linen into strips and tied the artery to staunch the blood.”

For reasons he didn’t clearly understand, Alex wanted to know everything he could about Jane Maxwell.

“May I see?” he asked softly.

“See?” Jane repeated uncertainly. “’Tis ugly as sin. ’Twas the beginning of all my misfortune.”

“Well, we’ve both survived a lot of muck under our feet tonight, and some bad luck as well… why not this?” he replied evenly, holding out his hand. “Please let me see your hurt, Jane.”

Slowly, dreading the sight of the now-familiar stub, Jane rested her hands on the tavern table and tugged at the leather fingers of her right glove. As she drew the doeskin gauntlet off her hand, the ivory extension, fashioned by a cobbler at Lady Maxwell’s direction, clattered to the table. The stubby index finger of her right hand lay exposed against her long slender middle finger.

Alexander picked up her hand and studied it matter-of-factly. As he did so, she was struck by the appearance of his own slender hands with their long, tapering fingers. “One would never suspect…” he murmured, turning her hand over, palm up. Her own soft pink flesh contrasted strongly with the hardness of his, probably the product of practicing the sport of archery, for which he had gained some renown. He took her chin in his other hand and forced her to look at him. Slowly he turned over her injured hand once again and bent forward to kiss it. Deliberately, he brushed his lips across its entire surface, briefly caressing the disfigured finger as if it were exquisitely precious. He glanced up and saw she was staring at him in wonder. “There. That’s done,” he said huskily. “The rest of you, I have no doubt, is perfect as well.”

Jane was thrown into confusion by the odd tremors radiating through her body. His lips had felt so soft against her skin. His touch seemed so distinctive, yet so reminiscent of Thomas’s caress. Then, Alexander eased himself out of his seat. He walked over to the innkeeper to drop a few coins on the bar, giving her time to insert the ivory finger in her glove and put it back on her hand.

“May I?” he said, extending his arm.

She tested her weight on her strained ankle. It hurt, but she could walk on it, if she moved slowly. As the two emerged into the April night, Alexander put a hand casually around her waist. Then he fell into step, offering the solid support of his other hand under her elbow.

“I trust, my dear Jane, you know the way home?”

“Aye, Alex Gordon—that I do.”

Part 2

1767–1782

The Silver Swanne, who
had no living note,
When death approacht,
unlock her silent throat.
Leaning her breast
against the reedie shore,
Thus sang her first and last
and sung no more,
Farewell all joys, O death
come close mine eyes.
More Geese than Swannes now live,
More fools than wise.

—Anonymous, seventeenth century

Twelve

M
AY
1767

A
RABELLA
O’B
RIEN
D
ELANEY TAPPED HER QUILL ON THE SIDE
of a large red leather-bound ledger, heedless of the ink blotches bleeding into the margins. Her attention had strayed from the jumble of figures and inaccurate calculations committed to the pages of the plantation’s accounts book by her brother Beven. Her eyes were focused, instead, on a wooden cart rumbling up the tree-lined avenue that ended in a circle of gravel outside her window.

The first sunny day in weeks displayed Antrim Hall at its very best. The Maryland plantation’s broad front fields were sprinkled with purple and yellow wildflowers, boxed off by white rail fences stretching in every direction. The fences defined the holdings Arabella had worked so hard to preserve since the untimely death of her elderly husband, Hugh Delaney, at the Ogilvy-Delaney Hunt the previous spring. Surely, she thought, a sixty-seven-year-old man should have had the sense to decline her brother Beven’s drunken challenge to jump his steed over a five-barred gate. But there you were, she sighed resignedly, snapping shut the heavy ledger. Men were simply an inferior species.

Arabella had been hopelessly distracted from her morning’s tasks even before the cart had appeared this warm spring day on the road leading to Antrim Hall. She had sat dreamily at her desk, with the May sunshine bathing her face, her jet black hair pulled back casually and tied at the nape of her neck like a man’s periwig. She delighted in the sun’s sensuous heat, which penetrated her pores and made her feel like a sleepy kitten. A kind of impatience had been gnawing at her for most of the morning. She was fed up with Beven’s inebriated carousing and with trying to make sense of her brother’s blatant mismanagement of their jointly held estate. And she was fed up with not ever having any fun.

The slender Arabella sighed once again, returning the quill to its holder. What she really had in mind to do was throw herself into the tall grasses that grew beside the brook beyond the distant ridge, and…

“Spring fever! At the ripe old age of nineteen, I’ve got myself a
serious
case of spring fever!” She laughed aloud, her cobalt blue eyes carefully charting the slow progress of the vehicle from her vantage point in the morning room. At length, the cart drew up in front of the white pillared porch and graceful front steps of the stately mansion.

“Mehitabel!” Arabella called loudly to her servant, while rising from her desk.

She would have to return to puzzle over Beven’s accounts later. The endless months of rain—continuing even into late May—had delayed the wheat planting, and Arabella was concerned that this bit of bad luck, plus Beven’s mounting gambling debts, would mean they’d be dangerously short of cash before fall.