Island of the Swans (57 page)

The coach halted in front of Number 6, St. James’s Square. In the pelting downpour, footmen scrambled to assist the Duke and Duchess of Gordon as they made a dash for the front door. As soon as the pair had handed their cloaks to the phalanx of waiting servants, the ducal couple marched past their startled English housekeeper, without so much as a nod in greeting. Hand in hand, they mounted the stairs with an urgency that appeared highly unseemly, considering the fact that it was high noon and Their Graces’ brother had been clapped into the Tower of London for the most heinous crimes. The door to the duchess’s bedchamber at the top of the stairs slammed shut.

Well! sniffed the housekeeper, retreating to the kitchen for a bracing cup of tea. What could one expect from Scots? They were probably all wild fanatics like Lord George Gordon!

For two days following their visit to the Tower, the Duke and Duchess of Gordon rarely left their bedchamber overlooking St. James’s Square. They were like a pair of travelers who had been stranded in a desert, prepared to breathe their last, only to stumble on a crystal pool of water that beckoned them to drink their fill.

“Really, Alex,” Jane chided her husband one morning, smiling slyly. They were still lying abed, although the hour was late. “I shall never be able to face that disapproving English housekeeper if we don’t stop this… this unseemly display!” She gently ran her fingers through the dark hair peppering his chest.

“Let the housekeeper be hanged!” Alex retorted, pulling her to him and nuzzling her neck with his lips.

“But we have work to do,” she insisted, ignoring his invitation to yet another bout of love. She sat upright in bed and crossed her legs under the bed linen. “Whom should we call upon first?”

Reluctantly, Alex rolled onto his side, propping his head up with the palm of his hand. Together, they planned their strategy, while in another part of her mind, Jane calculated how soon it would be before she would be pregnant again.

However, to her relief, Jane’s monthly flux began soon afterward. She wondered, as she and Alex made their appointed rounds in London of friends and acquaintances harmed by the mob, whether her childbearing years were perhaps at an end. She speculated that after such a long period of celibacy, perhaps her body had ceased to be a haven for the miracle of new life. With the crush of responsibilities and the strain of attempting to make amends for Lord George’s transgressions, Jane pushed the notion of having another baby to the far recesses of her mind.

At first, their peers were slow to respond to the Gordons’ direct expressions of sorrow. Lord George still languished in the Tower of London during the summer, but he had been moved to more commodious chambers in another section of the prison. This was due in great part to Thomas Erskine’s entreaties and the general respect most members of the House of Lords held for the duke himself. Several times each week, Lord George had taken to hosting dinner parties in his new prison cell—even after he had officially been charged with High Treason. He had the accounts for such frivolities sent directly to Alex for payment.

Among the scores of victims Alex and Jane called on from June through October, many had reacted quite favorably. The majority were stunned, in fact, to be singled out for the honor of being visited personally by a duke and his lady.

Sir George Savile, the originator of the Catholic Relief Act, whose house in Leicester Square had been gutted by fire, remained cool to any apologies. However, Lord Mansfield, whose residence on Bloomsbury Street, including his famous library, had been destroyed, received them cordially. Jane was overjoyed, because Mansfield was sure to sit on the case when Lord George was brought to trial. After this particular visit, Alex and Jane noticed the atmosphere around them warmed perceptibly.

It was mid-November, however, before Jane mustered sufficient courage to venture an appearance in Court.

“Don’t worry, my dear,” Alex reassured her as they mounted the steps to St. James’s Palace. “You’ve been a favorite of Queen Charlotte from the first.” He squeezed her arm to bolster her resolve. “You were clever enough to realize at the outset that the king has very great respect for his wife’s opinions—God help him!”

The duke and duchess were ushered into a large reception room filled with peers, merchants, and hangers-on, all milling about. Servants dressed in all manner and color of livery wove in and out of the assembly, delivering messages to clusters of people scattered around the room. Life-size portraits of male members of the Royal Family on horseback adorned the high walls of the ornate chamber, and the riders seemed to survey the bustling scene below.

Jane glanced about the room uneasily. She and Alex waited in one corner of the chamber until such time as they would be summoned to greet the king, by whose angry order Alex’s brother had been clapped into the Tower. Ladies whispered behind their fluttering fans and gentlemen exchanged knowing glances. ’Twould be great sport, Jane concluded morosely, if the assembled throng observed Alex and her being utterly snubbed or, worse yet, actually removed from the king’s chamber.

Jane groaned inwardly when she spotted the Duchess of Devonshire having a tête-à-tête with the bombastic Whig Parliamentarian, Charles Fox. The politician known as the Eyebrow whispered to Georgiana behind an upraised palm, his bushy black brows knitting together above his sly, brown eyes. His portly frame sported an elaborately embroidered pearl gray coat and matching waistcoat, set off at the throat by a linen stock folded and twisted in an intricate fashion. This dandy had allied himself with the Devonshires and the Prince of Wales in hopes, no doubt, that such friendship would one day make him chief minister when young George ascended the throne. Jane had no doubt that hanging a member of Clan Gordon, a family so identified with King and Court, would please this wily politician no end.

William Pitt the Younger approached the Duke and Duchess of Gordon to pay his respects. Turning her back on Fox and the Duchess of Devonshire, Jane smiled warmly at the attractive young man. At age twenty, the amiable Mr. Pitt had recently stood for one of the Parliamentary seats from the University of Cambridge and had lost, but had been offered another seat by a powerful magnate who controlled nine northern boroughs. Jane and Alex chatted with Pitt for a few moments, which took Jane’s mind off their impending interview with the king.

“Is it true, sir,” she asked, “that you’re totally opposed to the war in America?”

“I support a rapprochement with our Colonial cousins,” he answered lightly, eyeing her low-cut court gown with a certain restrained, but obvious, appreciation.

“But we hear the war goes so well for us now,” she countered. “Cornwallis has nearly secured the south and Clinton plans to mop up the last resistance in the Mid-Atlantic and the north…”

“I see you read the accounts of this conflict with as much attention as I do. But I wouldn’t count those chickens yet, my dear Duchess,” he said seriously.

“Perhaps not,” she replied thoughtfully, wondering, despite her best resolve, how Thomas would be affected if the war didn’t end as quickly as so many military men were predicting these days.

A letter from Hamilton had caught up with them in London. He wrote, in passing, that Thomas Fraser had been involved in a series of daring forays behind enemy lines to gather information from Loyalists, an effort that undoubtedly had helped the war. The captain had apparently made several mysterious excursions up to Maryland and back to retrieve vital intelligence from a disaffected wife of one of General Washington’s aides-de-camp. Angry with herself for her lack of self-discipline, Jane had found herself wondering if his travels ever took him in the direction of Antrim Hall and its seductive plantation owner. Thomas had told her during their three-day idyll at Loch-an-Eilean that a vixen named Arabella Delaney had been responsible for the late arrival of the fateful letter that had so changed her life. Jane forced another smile to her lips as she addressed Mr. Pitt.

“Well,” she said, “however the conflict in America resolves itself, I shall look forward to reports of your maiden speech next session.”

“I’m honored, madam,” he said, bowing gallantly.

During this exchange, Jane sensed the presence of someone else standing behind her.

“I trust your maiden speech won’t be defeatist twaddle, my good man!” growled Simon Fraser, who suddenly had appeared in their midst. “Or I shall have to beg for time to answer you.”

Jane paled visibly.

Why was Thomas’s godfather always materializing in her life at the worst moments?
she thought angrily.

Simon, for all his bulk, looked unwell, and was apparently as ill-humored as ever. The veteran campaigner, whose skin had a sallow cast to it, nodded curtly to acknowledge her presence.

“Word is, come spring, they’ll head for Delaware and Virginia, and that should finish it,” Simon allowed, glaring at William Pitt as if that concluded any discussion about the war in America.

Mercifully, the king’s majordomo gave them a sign, and soon Alex and she were standing before the king and queen.

“The Duke and Duchess of Gordon, Your Majesties,” intoned the majordomo.

Conversations were suspended, fans ceased fluttering, and all eyes were drawn to the drama unfolding.

“Duke… Duchess…” King George III murmured noncommittally.

Jane sank into a low curtsy and Alex bowed deeply.

“You do us great honor by receiving us today, Your Majesty,” Alex said carefully.

The king merely nodded and Queen Charlotte looked on silently, offering Jane the merest nod. However, her eyes seemed friendly, and Jane took a deep breath.

“We are not only honored to be in your presence.” Jane said quietly, trying her best to control her Scottish burr, “but profoundly grateful to be allowed to express our sorrow at the disruptions in the city last June. ’Twas only due to the decisive actions taken by Your Majesty,” she added, looking directly at the king, “that a far worse fate didn’t engulf the town.”

A hush entombed the entire room. Queen Charlotte, increasingly plump following the birth of the thirteenth child she had borne the king, extended her hands to Alex and Jane. She spoke in French with a heavy Teutonic accent.

“
Je suis très content de vous voir encore
,” she said, smiling. “
Ma chère duchesse, peut-être vous viendrez chez Buckingham bientôt, non?
”

“
Ah, oui, Madame
,” Jane replied in her halting French. “
Vous êtes très gentille.
”

“’Tis pleasant, indeed, to have you among us once again,” King George commented with considerably more warmth then he had expressed a few moments before. “We must compare notes on our Reynolds portraits when yours is completed, my dear Duchess,” he added with a twinkle.

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Jane murmured, curtsying deeply once again. “I should like very much to do that.”

She and Alex backed away from the two sovereigns in formal fashion. Jane could hardly contain her delight. The room resumed its buzz of conversation, and several people who had pointedly ignored the duke and duchess since the Gordon riots came forward to pay their respects. Nevertheless, Alex and Jane departed as quickly as was seemly. During the carriage ride home, they examined the scene in the palace drawing room from every angle.

“Odds fish! I vow the Duchess of D was actually gnashing her teeth at our triumph!” Jane crowed as their carriage rolled down the broad expanse of Pall Mall. “No doubt she’ll be driven to make double wagers at faro tonight to assuage her fury, the saucy wretch!”

“Bless me, but the Eyebrow looked none too pleased either,” Alex chuckled. “Did you catch his grimaces as we were leaving?”

Later, that crisp November night, Alex dismissed Jane’s maid and undressed her himself, taking a slow, sensual delight in removing the layers of her court gown and unlacing the stays of her stiff corset. At length, he peeled the thin cambric shift from her body. Sinking to his knees, he bade her kneel beside him as he covered her face and form with passionate kisses. Then, they made love on a fur rug in front of the fire with an abandon new to them both, though at the moment of Alex’s release, Jane fought against the vision of another night of love in front of another fire, in a simple stone cottage at Kinrara.

Give it up…
her heart cried into the night.

Twenty-Two