Island of the Swans (38 page)

Alex remained silent, an unfathomable look flickering in his eyes. At length he said, “You’ve been ill.”

“Aye,” she said, tilting her chin defensively. “But I’m better now.”

“Are you able to travel?”

“In a day or so, I expect.”

“Do you wish to return to Gordon Castle with me?” he asked evenly.

“As what, I wish to know?”

“That can’t be decided yet.”

Jane stared at him in disbelief.

“What in God’s name do you mean by that?”

“Mrs. Christie told me you weren’t well at Gordon Castle either.”

“That’s true,” Jane answered cautiously, her lips drawing together in a grim line. “I felt miserable for days.”

“Mrs. Christie says your courses never appeared during your stay in Fochabers—”

“She said what!” Jane choked.

Her mind flashed on an image of the old crone sorting through her cambric underclothes and petticoats.

“She tells me you may be with child,” Alex declared.

“I am.”

“Is it mine?” he asked coolly.

Jane stared at him, stunned into silence by the outrageous insult his words represented. Alex’s eyes were hooded, and a mirthless smile traced his lips.

“My dear Jane, since ’tis possible that you saw Fraser after my departure while you were still at your sister’s in Ayton, this child could be—”

Before Jane even realized what she was doing, she leaned over the bed and raked her nails with all her might across Alex’s cheeks.

“You bastard! You worthless sot!” she screamed, a rage the likes of which she’d never experienced taking possession of her. “The devil take you and all your damned, brainsick Gordons with you!” She threw the bedcovers off her body and plastered her nightdress against her abdomen, revealing the firm, round bulge that testified to her advancing pregnancy. “Look at this! Look at this, you swine! This is your bairn… this is what you made with that instrument between your legs, thanks to all those nights when you played me like a harp, holding yourself aloof… posing as my lord and master. This is your baby, God help it!” Alex stared at her wordlessly.

Jane abruptly rolled to her side, turning her back to him. “In actual fact, my lord Gordon,” she said, spitting out her words over her shoulder, “I don’t care whether you believe me or not. Just leave.”

“Jane, I—”

“Just leave!” she shouted, pounding her fist furiously against the wall in the same brutal fashion that Thomas had smashed the side of his hand into the crumbling castle wall at Loch-an-Eilean.

Alex bent down to retrieve his cloak from the floor where it had fallen during Jane’s attack.

“Will you come back to Gordon Castle?” he asked soberly.

A long silence hung between the ten paces that separated them

Finally Jane answered. “What choice do I have?” she replied bitterly, refusing to look at him. “I’m four months gone—with not a farthing of my own and a family that would promptly disown me if I turned my back on the glorious Dukedom of Gordon.”

Another silence punctuated Jane’s scathing retort.

Alex turned his back and walked out of the cottage, leaving Jane shivering in her nightdress despite the warmth of the crackling fire. Wearily, she tugged at the bed linen that lay piled around her knees and pulled it over her rounded abdomen. She lay on her back, her hands folded on her chest like a corpse, anticipating the sound of the coachman’s cry and the crack of a whip. When, at length, she heard the sound’s of Alex’s departure, she heaved a sigh and closed her eyes.

The Fourth Duke of Gordon had begun his journey north along a route she would have to follow only too soon.

Sixteen

S
EPTEMBER
1768

J
ANE’S BEDCHAMBER WAS SUFFOCATINGLY HOT, BUT SHE SEEMED
hardly able to catch her breath long enough between her labor pains to beg the midwife to open a window. In any case, the woman probably would think her daft for asking, since Scottish custom was to keep the birthing room airtight to ward off any evil humors that might take possession of the newborn.

If only this fetal prisoner could escape her body soon, Jane thought, gasping, with sweat pouring down her cheeks. She clutched at the headboard of the massive four-poster and bore down hard, as she’d been instructed. The pain was relentless as it reached crescendo after crescendo. It would subside for a few moments and then overwhelm her again with tremendous force.

During the brief respites, Jane’s mind wandered to a memory of the sound of Aunt Elizabeth’s low moans floating down the hall at Hyndford Close. She remembered Thomas describing how the sheep he tended would bleat and pant between contractions. It comforted her, somehow, to know that the ordeal her body was enduring was as normal as the rising of the sun or the migration of the birds. The youthful Thomas had told her all about the mystery of what would happen to her one day…

Thomas… if
only
Thomas were by her side…

Jane’s eyes widened in fear. Had she said anything aloud? Had Thomas’s name escaped her lips? Where was Dr. Ogilvy? Where was Alex? Did he care if she lived or died? Would she die? Would the baby?

Suddenly she was more frightened than she had ever been in her life. She knew Bathia Largue had died like this. Would anyone look after her bairn the way she had nurtured Geordie this past year? Silent tears slid down her cheeks. Another wave of pain swept over her. It caught her up with the force of a storm at sea and hurled her down into blackness where she could hear far-off voices whispering like the lapping of the ocean on the shores of Monreith.

“Soon, ’twill be over… very soon,” said a deep voice penetrating the fog of pain. She felt a cool cloth wipe her brow and then circle her face gently. “You’re doing fine, darling… all’s well, my love,” the voice told her urgently. She heard someone whisper, “’Tis so
hard
! I didn’t think ’twould be so hard”—and realized, much to her amazement, that the second voice was her own.

After a few moments, she ceased hearing the deeper voice. A door had closed on the other side of the bedchamber. Once again, she was alone with her agony. Suddenly, Jane felt an urge to push the baby out with all her might. The midwife was barking orders, and there were rustling sounds in the room. She strained in the darkness of her struggle to free the child inside her body, until, miraculously, the pain vanished and she heard the loud, insistent cries of a newborn baby, far off, as if from high on a heather-clad moor.

A cart pulled by a stout-hearted Highland pony stopped a hundred yards from the still roofless new addition to Gordon Castle. Stones stood in neat piles nearby, waiting to be added to the exterior walls of the half-finished pavilion.

“Careful, now!” shouted Alexander to the crew of gardeners attempting to lift an eight-foot lime sapling out of the cart. “We can’t have you killing the Duchess Tree before it’s even planted. Easy, now!”

Jane watched as estate workmen shoveled mounds of rich, moist soil into the hole her husband had ordered dug. The silver lime tree was merely the most recent of many tokens of affection he had lavished on her since her tiny, perfect daughter—who, in truth, was the picture of Alex—made her appearance in the fall of 1768.

Charlotte had been baptized on a day selected by her father: October 23, the date that marked her parents’ first wedding anniversary. Alex had presented Jane with a diamond necklace, one that matched the earrings he had given her on that memorable night at Comely Gardens, when they were still friends and not yet affianced.

As Jane watched her husband grab a shovel, she wondered if the planting of the tree somehow symbolized a new beginning for their marriage—a new beginning of which Alex was reluctant to speak. Not once had he mentioned how much the baby looked like him, nor had he revealed his own desolation following the arrival of Thomas’s letter at Ayton House during their honeymoon. Without warning, the duke had simply reassumed the role of respectful husband following her recovery from childbirth.

Jane felt a flush rise to her cheeks when she thought of the cool and rather deliberate way Alex aroused her, once they again shared a marriage bed. Without alluding to their complicated past, she had willingly succumbed to his lovemaking. To do otherwise would have risked upsetting everything once more, and she didn’t think she would survive more turmoil. Yet she longed to tell him of her grief that he, along with Thomas, had been so terribly wounded by all the turns that fate had taken. She wanted him to know how much she wished to make peace with the past—a past she now realized could never include Thomas Fraser of Struy.

But, just like her husband, Jane couldn’t bring herself to put her feelings into words. Something in Alex’s manner and in her own heart prevented it. Her body responded almost instinctively to her husband’s skilled touch, but in moments of private, searing honesty, Jane knew that she, too, kept in check the flood gates of her emotions.

Stifling a sigh, she glanced over at the duke’s little Geordie who was hopping up and down excitedly as the men patted down the dirt around the new tree with the backs of their shovels. She didn’t give a fig if the servants or their neighbors thought it peculiar that the duke’s illegitimate son was treated as an equal in the nursery. He was sweet with Charlotte and dear to Jane herself, and that’s all that mattered, as far as she was concerned.

“Jane, darling,” Alex said, startling her from her wandering thoughts. “Would you come over here, please.”

The gardening crew leaned on their shovels as Alex handed her his, gesturing that she add a final topping of dirt at the base of the new sapling. When she obliged, Alex exclaimed, “Bravo, dearheart… you’ve just christened the Duchess Tree! May she grow and flourish!”

“Which branch of the Duchess Tree is for
me
?” demanded little Geordie, speaking his first complete sentence, much to everyone’s surprise and amusement.

Alex reached past his son’s head and grasped a thin reed bursting with delicate buds.

“This is you, my lad… and this little twig is baby Charlotte.” While the bystanders applauded, Alex leaned over to whisper to Jane, his breath warm and sensuous against her ear. “Now, what say you, my dear lady? Shall we retire to our chamber to do some planting of another kind? Who knows,” he added softly, “perhaps such bucolic pleasures will soon graft an heir-apparent on this lovely sapling?”

Jane enjoyed less than a year’s respite between Charlotte’s birth and her next pregnancy. In 1770, her second child, Alex’s heir, was born. From her bed on a bitterly cold morning in early February, Jane could hear the bells in the Bellie Church Tower in Fochabers, tolling the joyous news for a solid hour. Much to his father’s delight, the newly arrived Marquess of Huntly cried in unison for nearly that long.

Later in the day, when Alex appeared in Jane’s bedchamber, she greeted him with undisguised pride.

“Now, Alex, there’s the matter of a Christian name for this heir to the House of Gordon,” Jane said, sipping from a steaming cup of caudle, a fortifying liquid made of eggs, milk, and brandy. Leaning against a mound of pillows, she watched Nancy Christie tuck the baby into its cradle after its first feeding.