Island of the Swans (10 page)

“Well, lad, there’s no finer sight than a man in a kilt, and that’s the truth, wouldn’t you say?” Simon declared as the pair descended the stairway to the waiting coach. “Soon you’ll be dressed in one of your own when you join the army.”

Thomas merely nodded as the two climbed into Simon’s newly purchased landau, its matched pair of black horses prancing skittishly in the cold night air. For the first time in years, Simon felt almost at ease.
Promotions and pay raises could do that for a man
, he supposed.

Prestonfield House, glowing like a welcoming beacon at the end of the drive, loomed larger and larger through the coach window. The driver reined in the horses as the Maxwells’ rented livery approached a smartly accoutered black barouche that had drawn to a halt in front of them.

A satin-coated footman threw open their carriage door and Hamilton leapt out to assist Lady Maxwell, whose wide-hooped ball gown barely squeezed through the narrow opening. Jane paused on the small step of the coach as she gazed above the heads of the arriving guests and caught sight of a tall, scarlet-coated gentleman with a white wig. He was just emerging from another black barouche that bore a stag’s head crest on its shining enameled door.

Despite his pyramid of hair, the man was young, of medium height, with strikingly patrician good looks. His nose was slightly aquiline in shape and his hazel eyes were wide set beneath arching eyebrows, which instantly signaled approval or disdain.

The youthful Fourth Duke of Gordon paused and cast his eyes on Jane’s face. The young man’s gaze traveled down to her velvet cloak that was parted at her throat, revealing the deeply cut neckline of the pale blue ball gown beneath. The slim sleeves of the satin gown ended at her elbow and cobwebs of lace swirled down to her delicate wrists. For the longest moment, the gentleman stared at her with practiced aplomb before finally stepping onto the crimson carpet that led the way into Prestonfield House.

Jane remained frozen on the carriage’s narrow running step. The duke’s imperious mother emerged next from the coach and cast a curious glance in Jane’s direction. The final passenger in the coach to set foot on the scarlet carpet was a man at least ten years the dowager duchess’s junior. Staats Morris, Katherine Gordon’s second husband, took his wife’s plump arm and guided her up the steps and into the house.

“Jenny!”

Thomas Fraser approached Jane’s coach with a scowl, having just emerged from his godfather’s smart new landau.

“Must you stare at that blighter who practically undressed you with his eyes!”

Startled from her reverie, Jane glanced down at Thomas and Simon Fraser, who had joined his ward on the gravel drive.

“’Twas just that he looked so familiar,” she mused. “I think he was trying to place me as well.”

“I think the Duke of Gordon was trying to place you where you have no business being!” Thomas retorted heatedly.

“My, my, Thomas,” Jane twitted him, glad to have the man positively identified. “His Grace certainly ruffles your feathers, doesn’t he?”

“Thomas is right,” Simon growled, heading for the ornate entrance.

“You shouldn’t be so brazen just because the flamin’ Duke of Gordon looks at you cross-eyed, lassie.”

Jane shot the brigadier a murderous look, which he took in, unblinkingly. Then she pointedly grasped Thomas’s arm, leaving Simon to escort Lady Maxwell up the stairs following the path taken by the duke and his family.

All right, lass
, Brigadier General Simon Fraser thought, grimly staring at Jane’s velvet-cloaked back.
So you, too, acknowledge we are enemies. Let the battle begin!

In December, dusk fell by three o’clock in the afternoon. Hogmanay guests had been invited for nine and, thus, Prestonfield House was ablaze with a thousand candles. Light poured from the open entrance as the magnificently adorned ladies and handsomely tailored gentlemen mounted the front stairs in succeeding waves. The night air had taken on a crystalline quality, transforming the lighthearted chatter exchanged by arriving guests into puffs of white smoke.

During the long years of friendship between the Maxwells and Sir Algernon Dick and his family, Jane had visited Prestonfield House countless times. Never had she seen the mansion look so beautiful as it did this New Year’s Eve. As the housemaids scurried to relieve the Maxwell party of their cloaks, Jane caught sight of the red-coated figure from the drive. He was striding in the direction of a small library off the far end of the hall. Turning abruptly toward Thomas, who looked subdued as he watched the elegantly attired nobleman disappear from view, she asked softly, “Do you think we could find a quiet place where we could review the minuet just one more time?”

It was the only part of the evening that truly terrified her—the moment, just before midnight, when she would be expected, as part of the ritual of her sixteenth birthday and her first ball, to dance with a partner alone on the floor. It would be a demonstration of her attainment of womanhood, carried off under the critical gaze of the parents and friends of the other youthful ladies coming of age that season.

“The minuet is your best dance,” Thomas said absently, his eyes still focused on the library door, which had closed after the duke entered. “What you need to practice is ‘The Waterman’s Rant.’ Sir Algernon, at his age, has surely never heard of it.”

Sir Algernon was scheduled to assume the duties of Jane’s father this night. Neither she nor Thomas spoke of Sir William Maxwell’s adamant refusal that morning to attend his daughter’s birthday celebration. Nor did they allude to his angry departure for the ramshackle estate of Monreith later in the day.

Jane found herself wondering silently, as they were about to be formally announced by Prestonfield’s majordomo,
why
the Duke of Gordon should be closeted in the library, just as the ball was about to commence. In the intervening five years, she noted how his boyish features had matured into a handsome face with well-defined, sensual lips that seemed to mask a faintly mocking smile.

Glancing self-consciously down at Thomas’s Christmas gift, a lace handkerchief which she had draped artfully over her injured hand, Jane’s mind flashed back suddenly to the day of her accident and the strip of pristine linen with the stag’s head crest embroidered on one corner, which had, according to Thomas, staunched the flow of blood gushing from her wounded finger. Unbidden, a vision of the young duke’s frank appraising stare tonight loomed in her mind. It was a far cry from his open, friendly gaze that memorable day of the last pig race in the High Street. She wondered what had caused such a change in his boyish countenance since they last met.

Sir Algernon Dick quietly shut the door of the library, muting the sound of the fiddler’s reel wafting in from the noisy ballroom. He was pleased that the party had gotten off to such a rousing start and that Jane, his special pet among all of Magdalene’s brood, was managing to hold her own to great effect on the dance floor.

“Your Grace… forgive me for not coming sooner,” said the elderly doctor to his visitor. “I’ve only just been apprised of your arrival. How good it is to see you again. Your mother and stepfather appear to be in the pink.”

The young man in the scarlet coat had been staring out the window at the moonlight that illuminated the east end of the book-lined library. He absently tapped his pair of white kid gloves against the frosty glass panes.

“Ah, Sir Algernon, how kind of you to leave your guests,” said the Duke of Gordon, his years at Eton and Cambridge reflected in the elegance of his speech. He had turned around to greet his host and slapped his gloves on a small side table, almost as if the gesture spoke of his eagerness to dispense with pleasantries. “I appreciate your granting my request for a few words with you in private. I hope ’tis not too much of an imposition.”

The doctor, thin and stooped from advancing age, offered his visitor a flask of vintage port, and the two men sat down before the fire burning brightly in the grate.

“Your Grace has provided just the excuse I needed to escape the din,” Sir Algernon assured his guest, “although, I must say I am looking forward to the debut of Mistress Jane Maxwell later this evening. You know the lass?”

Sir Algernon poured the wine from a heavy crystal decanter into stemmed glasses.

“I certainly know
of
the minx,” Alexander chuckled, “and I see from the brief glimpse I caught of her as I arrived, she’s grown into a beauty… but no, we’ve never actually been introduced.”

The doctor surreptitiously studied the young duke above the rim of his glass as he slowly savored the ruby liquid. “How have you been faring, Your Grace?” Sir Algernon inquired. He was curious to hear why the twenty-two-year-old duke had requested an impromptu audience. “I trust that my prescriptions for that dreadful ague you brought back from France in sixty-four have had good effect?”

“They did, sir,” the duke replied, “though there were moments that summer when I wondered if that fever wasn’t an excessive price to pay for a young man’s tour of the Continent.”

In his role as family physician to the ducal Gordons, Sir Algernon had intervened discreetly in several family matters during the years since the death of Alexander’s father, Cosimo, who had succumbed to a similar malady when his son was only nine. Alexander’s mother, Katherine Gordon, was left with six young children after her husband’s demise, and the lusty young widow had quickly wed Staats Morris, a brash, ambitious army captain from the Colonies—New York or New Jersey, Sir Algernon thought—a decade younger than she. In the early years of their odd marriage, the couple spent lavishly from young Alexander’s estate, both on the Continent and London, in an effort to advance their own fortunes at the Court of St. James.

“Tell me, Your Grace, how fares the Dowager Duchess and Colonel Morris this holiday season?” Sir Algernon inquired. “I saw them only briefly when they were announced upstairs.” He was curious to learn of Alexander’s relationship with Lady Katherine and her husband, now that the family was reunited and the lad had reached his majority.

“My mother and her husband have a most comfortable living at Huntly Lodge,” Alexander replied evenly, “and seem to enjoy it,
especially
when it is laid on someone else’s expense.”

Sir Algernon speculated that Alexander’s caustic tone indicated a high degree of irritation about the spendthrift habits of his mother and stepfather. The Gordon estates had prospered of late, but it would be a decade, at least, before the coffers were replenished to their former abundance.

“Ah, well,” replied Sir Algernon, refilling his glass of port. “It’s good to see you looking so fit. You know, lad, I’ve never encountered such a nasty variety of ague in my thirty years of practice. You were quite delirious by the time they brought you to me.”

“I don’t remember much of the sea voyage, or anything, really… only of waking up in your upstairs guest chamber,” Alexander acknowledged quietly, pausing to sip from his crystal glass.

The duke’s words brought to mind that during the lad’s convalescence eighteen months previously at Prestonfield House, Sir Algernon had heard vicious gossip in Edinburgh that the Gordon Madness had infected the young heir, as it had so many Gordons before him. If anyone was mad in the current generation of Gordons, it was Alexander’s younger brother George—by far the most peculiar of the lot. Unfortunately, however, several of Sir Algernon’s servants had witnessed Alexander during his illness, at times unconscious from the fever, crying out at unseen terrors and weeping as if he were a small, abandoned boy. To those inclined to tittle-tattle, it had certainly caused talk. Such slander, alluding to the “Madness”—which indeed had surfaced in countless noble families where close family members often married—could taint the young man’s future at Court, to say nothing of his future as a husband.

“Pray, tell me, Your Grace,” inquired the older man, smiling encouragingly, “how can I be of help on this New Year’s eve?”

“’Tis a delicate matter. Sir Algernon, and one I must beg you to keep in strictest confidence.”