Island of the Swans (86 page)

A wooden sign squeaking forlornly on a weathered post indicated that ale could be purchased in a dingy tavern called the Lovat Arms.

Jane dismounted and entered the gloomy, low-ceilinged chamber. The proprietor was asleep in a chair in the corner, his stained leather apron stretched tautly across his enormous belly. At the sound of her footsteps, he belched, fluttered his protuberant eyes, and sat up with a start.

“Zounds, man! You startled me!” he snorted.

“My apologies, sir,” Jane said in her gruffest voice. “Can you tell me where to find the croft of Thomas Fraser?”

“Which Thomas Fraser?” he said, cocking his head toward her curiously. “There were two.”

“Captain Thomas Fraser of Struy—late of the 71st Fraser Highlanders. His family had the estate in this district, and now he raises sheep.”

“Ah…
that
Thomas Fraser,” her rotund informant exclaimed. “His cottage is just down the road from here and up Broch Lane.”

“Thank you, sir,” Jane said, trying to mask her excitement. She turned to go.

“No point in thankin’ me, laddie. You’ll not find ’im there.”

Jane stared at him dumbly.

“Where is he?” she asked, wondering if he had finally moved back into Struy House after all.

“Somewhere near Baltimore, I heard. America, don’t you know? Left these parts… och… it must be about a year or so ago.”

“W-what…?” Jane stammered, her voice trailing off. She stepped back a few paces and sagged against a rough-hewn post that held up the roof.

The innkeeper squinted at her and said, “If you know Captain Fraser, as it seems you do… then you know about the muddle over his godfather’s will. Well, the judgment was finally rendered. The sale was ruled incomplete, and thereby not belonging to him, despite old Simon’s intentions. It was offered to Thomas for purchase, but he didn’t have the silver, poor sod. He lost the estate.”

“Oh, no!” Jane exclaimed with an anguished cry. “It can’t be true…
no
!” Without another word to her informant, she stumbled out of the chamber and leapt on the gray pony tethered outside. The startled horse lurched forward as she gouged her heel against his flanks. The animal tore past the ragged child and down the deserted street at a dead run, quickly disappearing from view in a swirl of dust and drifting autumn leaves.

The cottage at the end of Broch Lane was a deserted hovel. It sat in a small clearing overgrown with brambles and thorns. Half of the thatched roof had fallen into the solitary dirt-floored chamber. One wall of the structure consisted of mere rubble, apparently scavenged for building material by the few remaining neighbors in the glen. An unshorn sheep chewed on a gorse bush outside, unruffled by Jane’s sudden appearance.

Fighting back tears, she surveyed the desolate scene. The only door to the croft was half off its hinges. A short-eared owl screeched a protesting hoot and flapped its wings, scurrying from its perch on a windowsill into the chill air overhead.

Jane stepped inside the one-room hut Thomas had called home for three torturous years while he waited for his court case to be decided.

While he waited for me to come to him…

Now, the room bore no witness that he or anyone else had ever lived there. There was no furniture in the barren chamber, just a cracked, blackened pot near the hearth. Jane thought her heart would burst at the bleakness of it all, the poverty of spirit this existence must have inflicted on the man she loved so dearly. Her throat tightened as she ran her fingers over the windowsill, the remaining stone walls, the rude hand-hewn mantel over the tiny fireplace. The sheer
loneliness
of it all! She was positively sickened by the thought of Thomas living within these four walls at the very moment she was dining on pheasant and champagne inside the silk-lined walls of her London and Edinburgh residences.

As she caressed the remnants of his life, her fingers grazed something stiff—a tattered piece of rolled parchment, wedged between the fireplace’s beam and the jagged stones of the hearth.

She caught her breath. Her fingers trembled as she sought to untie the knotted leather thong that bound it. Slowly, she unrolled it and stepped to the chamber’s one small window. A narrow shaft of late afternoon sunlight slanted across the short missive.

Jenny,

My heart is in the Highlands. I leave thee, my love, and seek a new home.

Thomas Fraser of Struy
2 June l788

Sinking to the sod floor, his note clutched in her hand, Jane gave vent to bitter tears for all the words not said, actions not taken.

You have a life waiting for you in America?
she’d asked him that snowy night in Edinburgh.

If I want it
, he’d answered, the candlelight dancing on the wall of the small chamber atop Simon’s townhouse.
Just as your life is here
—
or in America. With me
—
or without me. However you want it to be, Jane…

Oh, how very much she realized now she had wanted it to be with him… here… in the Highlands they both loved so much. He had waited nearly three years for her to come to him. When she didn’t and there was no possibility of recovering Struy House, or even surviving here, he’d charted the only course open to him.

I leave thee
,
my love, and seek a new home.

A line of carriages filled the mud-choked roads from the Washington-Philadelphia Post Road leading to the entrance of Antrim Hall itself. Rain splattered the fur-trimmed muffs and beaver hats of the wedding guests, but no one seemed to mind. Arabella O’Brien Delaney Boyd was embarking on her third marriage in twenty-five years at eight o’clock on a Christmas Eve, and witnessing such an event was well worth any inconvenience.

Arabella’s long-time servant trundled down the hallway and knocked sharply on Thomas Fraser’s door. Mehitabel’s dark brown eyes nearly popped out of her ebony, moon-shaped face.

“Captain Fraser… you gotta talk some sense into dat woman,” she said in a singsong voice when he opened the door. “All dat girl ever say was she want to marry you, sir… and
now
she say she won’t go through with it!”

Thomas quickly tucked his linen shirt into his breeches and followed the servant to Arabella’s bedchamber.

“You’re going to hate me if we do this!” cried the black-haired bride-to-be sprawled in her pale yellow gown across the massive bed, her elaborately coiffed head buried in her arms. “This is a terrible thing we’re doing. You’re going to feel trapped and henpecked and you’ll go back to Scotland! I just know you will.”

Mehitabel backed out of the room with a worried frown and closed the door.

“No…
no
, Arabella,” Thomas said soothingly. He lowered his large frame on the bed and kissed her ear. “What’s all this about, dearheart?” he whispered gently. “You’re not going to abandon me at the altar, are you now?”

“But I’m
pregnant!
” she wailed. “I’m forty-one years old, and I’m pregnant. ’Tis a flaming disgrace!”

“I’ve told you from the moment we knew about the bairn that I couldn’t be happier! A babe coming to us at our advanced age! ’Tis some sort of miracle from God. I am proud to be your husband, and the father of this bairn… truly I am, pet.”

“You never would have married me if it weren’t for the baby, though, would you?” she said reproachfully, leaning her elbow on the bed and looking up at him. “You’d have gone on forever, running Antrim Hall for my brother Beven and me, sneaking into the summerhouse to bed me until we were too old to—”

“I would have gladly married you, minx, if you’d told me of this a wee bit sooner,” he laughed. “’Tis your own damned fault you’re facing the good reverend, so many months gone.”

“I thought I’d lose it, like all the others,” she sighed. “And then, when I didn’t, I thought you wouldn’t make love to me if you knew… or you’d leave.”

“Arabella!” Thomas interjected her with mock indignation. “Is that any way to describe your faithful retainer—forever at your service?”

“Well, you might have abandoned ship,” she said sulkily. Then she looked up at him through her tear-soaked lashes. “Only
you
could have done this,” she added. “I’ve buried two husbands and kept myself cozy with a few lost souls over the years, but only
you
, Thomas Fraser, could make a baby with a woman of the ridiculous age of forty-one. I’ll never forgive you!”

Thomas threw back his head and roared with laughter.

“Maybe I’ll make
ten
!”

“Not if they make my tummy feel as wretched as this one does.”

She bit her lip, and cast her cobalt eyes on the noticeable bulge protruding beneath her skirts. A sheen of perspiration glazed her upper lip.

“Are you feeling all right, pet?” Thomas asked sharply, glancing at her with a worried frown.

“I
can’t
get sick now!” she groaned in a low voice that clearly indicated she felt unwell. “We deliberately scheduled this as an
evening
wedding!”

But sick, she was, and Thomas gently held her shoulders as she lost her last meal into a nearby basin.

“Poor, poor ’Bella,” he said soothingly. “You’ll feel much better now, pet.” He eased her back down on the bed and patted her clammy forehead with a damp cloth.

“Oh, Thomas,” she sighed, exhausted and spent. “I wonder if it’ll be a girl?” She looked at him tenderly. “Would you like that… a little girl to replace your Louisa?”

He gazed at her somberly. They had no secrets between them. That was the source of their strength. When he had arrived at her door, threadbare and nearly starving fifteen months earlier, he had recounted to her exactly what had transpired since he’d last seen her after the war.

“I’m woefully homesick and sore of heart, dear friend,” he had said that first night over a dinner of cold chicken and chilled wine served in the old summerhouse. “Sometimes, I can’t believe I abandoned the fight and left the Highlands like so many before me,” he had added morosely, shaking his head, “but I had barely the silver for my passage, once my debts to the lawyers were paid. However,” he had said, brightening, “I’m willing to work as a factor or plowman. Whatever. ’Tis entirely up to you, if you’ll have me in your employ.”

Arabella’s brother Beven had been less than enthusiastic when she decided to turn over the reins of running the plantation to Thomas. But to Thomas’s observation, the dissolute sot seemed relieved not to have to work so hard. It left the old boy more time to drink with his cronies in Annapolis.

Now that Thomas was to be Beven’s brother-in-law, O’Brien was even less cordial. Antrim Hall was entailed by his father’s will, which stipulated Beven would keep control of the plantation which he owned jointly with Arabella until it was inherited by either his own son—an unlikely eventuality, since he hadn’t even a wife—or, by any son of Arabella’s if hers was the sole male heir.

Thomas reached for Arabella’s hand and kissed her palm.

“No child can ever be replaced, dearheart,” Thomas said gently. “But this new one—lad or lassie—can bring light to our lives. I am honored to take you as my wife, my beautiful ’Bella… and to call myself father of your bairn.”

“
Our
bairn,” she said smugly, patting her abdomen. “No one can doubt, Captain Fraser, that we did this together.”