Joan Wolf Read online

  “I think she is.” Robert’s blue eyes stared at Douglas with a straight, uncompromising look. “Were you talking to her about Macdonald?” he asked steadily.

  Douglas, thrown off balance by such a direct approach, answered truthfully. “Yes.”

  The clear blue gaze kindled. “I thought so. She didn’t look happy when I came in the door.” He leaned forward in his chair. “The less Frances hears about or is reminded of him, the better it will be for her. I don’t want her upset. She is my wife and I can keep her safe and happy so long as he stays away. He is still in South America I take it.”

  “Yes,” said Douglas briefly.

  “He would do himself no good by coming back.”

  “I think he knows that.” Douglas rose. “You have nothing to worry about. Lord Robert. Frances is, as you said, your wife. That is not a commitment she would ever take lightly.”

  After Douglas had left Robert sat staring into the fire with a preoccupied face. He looked like a man wrestling with a major problem.

  The Sedburghs went to the theater that night, and their box was besieged at the intermissions. Robert could scarcely see his wife for the masculine heads clustered around her.

  “You’re a lucky dog, Rob,” said Henry Faringdon in his ear. “For the past two years I’ve been telling myself that nobody could be as beautiful as I remembered Frances Stewart. And now here she is, and my memory seems dull in comparison.”

  Robert looked at him almost remotely. “Yes,” he said. “And how have you been, Henry?”

  Their conversation was halted by Frances, who had risen and come across to them. “Good evening. Lady Robert,” said Mr. Faringdon reverently. She gave him her hand and Robert said, “London must have been dull without you, my love.”

  She cast him a glance of amusement mingled with irritation, “I think the next act is about to start,” she said pointedly, and they finally managed to clear out their box. —

  Frances’s maid was brushing her hair that evening when the connecting door between their bedrooms opened and Robert came in. He was still in his evening shirt, which he had opened at the neck. He sat down in a rose velvet chair, leaned back, and regarded his wife thoughtfully.

  The maid was vigorously pulling the brush through her thick hair, which glistened in the firelight. She wore a green velvet robe the color of her eyes. She looked at Robert in the mirror and said to her maid, “That will be all, Mary, thank you. You may go to bed now.”

  “Yes, my lady.” The maid discreetly retired, closing the bedroom door quietly behind her.

  Frances smiled at her husband. “A busy day,” she said lightly.

  He did not smile back. “Yes,” he agreed. “It was.” She didn’t say anything and after a moment he went on, “I think half of London has remained bachelors because of you.”

  She regarded him steadily. “Is that what is bothering you, Rob?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not such a fool as to be jealous of your popularity.” There was a note of anger in his voice and, hearing it, she rose and went to stand at the foot of the bed so that she was directly facing him.

  “Then what is the matter?” she asked quietly. “You’ve been strange all evening.”

  “Have I?” he laughed harshly. Then, as if the words were wrenched out of him against his will, he brought it out. “Tell me, Frances, what would you do if Ian Macdonald came back?”

  “What would I do?” She stared at him in amazement. “Good God, Rob, you don’t think I’d betray you? After all you’ve done ...”

  He swore, something he never did. “I don’t want you to stay with me out of gratitude!” The note of anger she had heard in his voice a moment before had reappeared, and mixed with it now was an audible strain of bitterness.

  Frances was deadly serious. She had never seen him like this before, and she was suddenly certain that the whole future of her marriage depended on how she handled this moment. Her eyes flickered quickly to the bed beside her. He saw the look. “Oh, I have no right to complain. I know that. You’ve never refused me. You’re always warm and loving.” He stood up and went to poke at the fire. “Forget what I said.” He leaned his shoulders against the mantel and looked at her out of eyes that were wary and guarded against hurt.

  “I can’t forget it,” she said. Robert was right. This was not a problem that could be settled by going to bed. It required words. The right words. From her. She took a breath and said to him what she had never said before. “How could I leave you, Rob? I love you.”

  The sudden harsh intake of his breath betrayed him. He took an involuntary step toward her and then stopped. “You don’t have to say that.”

  “I said it because I wanted to say it and because it is the truth. You are the man that I love.” She grinned at him mischievously. “Now what are you going to do about it?”

  “I’ll think of something,” he answered, his own face lighting in a returning smile as he crossed the room purposefully and scooped her up into his arms.

  Chapter Eleven

  0 lang will his ladie

  Look frae the Castle Doune,

  Ere she see the Earl o’ Moray

  Come soondan throu the toun

  -ANONYMOUS

  Douglas heard nothing from Frances for six months after she had returned to Aysgarth. They had always corresponded intermittently, but now even that communication was severed. Frances, aware for the first time of Robert’s insecurity, did not want to do anything to feed it. And Douglas understood that Robert wanted to see her relationship with the Macdonalds broken. With his uncomfortable facility for seeing the other person’s point of view, Douglas could not say he blamed him.

  Consequently, Douglas was stunned to receive a brief message from Frances in August. Her characteristically firm handwriting looked strangely uneven. “Robert has been killed,” she wrote. “Can you come? Frances.”

  Five hours later he was in Kent, turning into the Aysgarth drive. The butler showed him into a large, beautifully paneled room and said, “I will. inform Lady Robert you have arrived, sir.”

  Douglas nodded, then frowned and said, “Wait! Can you tell me what happened?”

  “Yes, sir,” replied the butler. His face was furrowed with sorrow. “It was a fall from a horse, Mr. Macdonald. Lord Robert was returning from an inspection of the new cottage repairs. From what we’ve been told he was cantering along the woodland path when a child darted out onto the path directly in front of him. He pulled his horse up so abruptly that the horse lost its balance and fell to its knees. Lord Robert was thrown. He hit his head on a rock.” The butler’s voice began to tremble. “He never regained consciousness, Mr. Macdonald. The mother of the child saw what had happened and fetched help. They brought him back to Aysgarth and he died three hours later in Lady Robert’s arms.”

  “Oh my dear God,” Douglas was shaken to the core. “Thank you,” he managed.”

  “Yes, sir.” The servant looked directly at him and the class barrier between them crumbled. “I’m glad you’ve come, Mr. Macdonald. Lord and Lady Aysgarth are distraught, and Miss Helen is frightened and bewildered. Lady Robert needs someone to stand by her.”

  “That I can do, Coombs,” Douglas returned. “I only wish I could do more.”

  When Frances came into the saloon a few minutes later Douglas thought his heart would break looking at her. She wore a soft black dress and her hair was combed smoothly off her face and fastened in a loose knot at the nape of her neck. She was very pale. “Douglas!” Her voice broke. “I’m so glad you’ve come.”

  “Oh, my dear,” he said, his voice infinitely gentle. “I am so sorry.” He held out his arms and for the second time in his life felt the slender, grief-stricken body of his only love sobbing against his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, Douglas,” she finally said, the words muffled by his coat. “I always seem to be crying on you.” He didn’t reply, but very briefly he allowed his cheek to touch her hair. She drew back and dried her cheeks with a lacy ha
ndkerchief. “I still can’t believe it. We were going to Cornwall next week, just the two of us. It was going to be another honeymoon, Rob said.” Abruptly she stopped talking and bit her lip.

  “I came immediately,” he said. “Thank God I was in London.”

  “Papa could not get here in time for the funeral, you see,” she explained. “It’s set for tomorrow. And I needed someone of mine. Thank you, Douglas, for coming.”

  Later that night as he lay in bed listening to the rustle of the trees outside his window, Douglas thought about her words. “Someone of mine ...” That was how she regarded him. A big brother. A faithful friend. Someone of hers. It never crossed her mind that his feelings for her were stronger than hers for him. She never cast enough thought his way to think it was a painful role for him to act as a brother to her whom he had loved since first he set eyes on her. Her pale, sorrowful face with its great sad eyes stirred and moved him just as the flowerlike child’s face had so many years ago at Castle Hunter. She was his love, although she never thought of him. He would walk over burning coals for her sake. And she would never know how much it cost him.

  Lord Robert Sedburgh was buried the next day, a day of beautiful August weather that seemed to mock the somberness of the occasion. For the first time Frances entered the little gray stone church where the Sedburghs had worshipped for centuries. The service instead of comforting her filled her with a greater sense of desolation. It seemed intolerable that she had to say goodbye to Rob in this alien church, in this alien service. She missed, achingly, the plangent tolling of Gregorian chant, the rich sound of the Latin rite. Yet this was Rob’s church. It was the service he would have wanted. He seemed very far away from her now.

  That evening, after a dinner full of long silences, Lady Aysgarth announced she was going to bed, and Frances drifted into the drawing room and over to the piano. Robert’s mother on the stairs heard the first few notes and turned to go back. Frances shouldn’t be playing the piano now, she thought. Then she stopped as Frances began to sing. It was an old ballad, but neither Lady Aysgarth, nor the two men listening in the dining room, had ever heard it sung like that; slow and measured and full of grief, like the role of a muffled drum:

  Ye Highlands, and ye Lawlands,

  O where have ye been?

  They hae slain the Earl of Murray

  And they layd him on the green.

  He was a braw gallant,

  And he rid at the ring;

  And the bonny Earl of Murray

  O he might hae been a king!

  The last note died away, and Lady Aysgarth turned back up the stairs, the tears sliding silently down her face. In the dining room Douglas sat with bowed head, listening to words that were written about the death of a sixteenth-century Stewart noble sung now by another Stewart for the untimely death of another fine young man. Lord Aysgarth said to him, “I shall always be glad that Robert had Frances, even if only for a little while. He loved her so.”

  “Yes,” said Douglas, staring at the tablecloth. “I know he did.”

  Douglas stayed until Frances’s father came and then he left for London. He found a letter from Ian awaiting him. It was a long letter, full of news of the South American campaign. New Granada had agreed to assist Bolivar in a new effort to free Venezuela from the iron rule of Spain. In order to counter the brutal Spanish tactics of killing all republicans out of hand, Bolivar had responded with a proclamation of guerra a muerte—”war to the death.” No longer, Ian wrote, would quarter be given to captured royalists.

  “I do not think myself that it is a good idea,” he wrote, “although I can understand why Bolivar was forced to do it. Too many Venezuelans are serving with the royalists because they know that if we capture them they will be spared, whereas if they were republicans and captured they would be killed out of hand. As a result of guerra a muerte we may get more volunteers, but I don’t think the resulting bloodbath will be worth it. Bolivar wants to found a homeland and so it is in his interest to increase the population and wealth of Venezuela. He is defeating his own purposes by this action.

  “But, God, Douglas, he is a great man! Here he was at Trujillo, with six hundred men behind him, declaring war on the whole Spanish Empire. One can’t help but love a man like that.”

  At the very end of the letter, as though it was an afterthought, he wrote, “How is Frances?”

  Douglas replied almost immediately with the news of Robert’s death. He sent the letter to Caracas. How, he wondered, did one deliver mail to a man in the middle of a guerra a muerte?

  Ten months after Robert’s death Frances went to live with her father in Edinburgh. Robert’s brother John was finished with Oxford and living at home, and it was obvious to everyone, his parents included, that he was much more devoted to Frances than he should be. When Frances had told Lady Aysgarth she was going to go to her father, the countess had reluctantly agreed it would be best. Frances had promised to bring Nell to London for a visit twice a year so the Sedburghs would be able to see her.

  Then, after an absence of three and a half years, Frances went home to Scotland, taking her daughter with her.

  Chapter Twelve

  Western wind, when will thou blow,

  The small rain down can rain?

  Christ, that my love were in my arms

  And I in my bed again!

  —ANONYMOUS

  It was May 18, 1815, less than a month before the battle of Waterloo ended forever Napoleon Bonaparte’s dream of European domination. Ian Macdonald, who had wanted to fight in the war against Napoleon, was standing at Fort Charles, the sentinel built by the English to guard Kingston Harbor, thousands of miles away from Europe. His eyes were on the high mountains of Jamaica, but his thoughts were far from the peaceful, tropical scene before him. He was thinking about war. Not the relatively civilized war that had been fought in Europe between opposing armies, but the brutal, agonizing guerra a muerte that had destroyed Venezuela.

  They had been beaten. The brutal general Jose Tomas Boves had managed to rally the semi-savage llaneros, wild, deadly horsemen of the plains, and had loosed them all over the country to massacre republicans. Ian remembered vividly the battle that had ended it all. At La Puerta there had been 500 republicans against 2,300 under Tomas Boves. Half the republicans had been left dead on the field, and Boves had speared or shot all his prisoners.

  Ian had been wounded in the shoulder but had made it to Caracas with Bolivar. The nightmare evacuation of Caracas, when ten thousand men, women and children had chosen to undertake the punishing long retreat to the coast rather than wait for Boves, was mercifully vague in his mind, as he himself had been burning with fever during most of it. It was not until they had reached Margarita Island that Ian had received proper medical attention. If he had not been so physically tough, he would have died.

  They had been beaten. By the end of 1814 the republicans held only Margarita Island. Boves had purged all existing republicans on the mainland, cutting the throats of prisoners, women, and children as he took town after town. A few scattered guerrilla republican bands still remained, but they were well hidden in remote and inaccessible places.

  Ian had recently joined Bolivar in Jamaica. Their purpose was to talk to the Duke of Manchester, the British governor. Bolivar had still not given up hope of winning British assistance in the fight for South American independence. Ian was cynical about the possibility of British help, and not convinced of the wisdom of even applying for it. But he could not refuse to lend the support of his company when it was so urgently requested by his commander. He had been in Jamaica for about ten days, most of which time had been spent in deep discussion about the future of South America. The Duke of Manchester was an enlightened and intelligent man, who had listened with undisguised interest to Bolivar’s analyses of his homeland’s dilemma:

  “Our peoples have been kept in a state of childhood for three hundred years,” he told the Duke grimly, while Ian listened in silent sympathy. “They have been
forbidden to cultivate European crops, to manufacture goods, have been forced to do nothing but grow coffee, sugar, indigo and cotton, to keep herds on the savannas, and to mine the earth for gold-—for the masters of the country.” He was right, of course, but Britain was not going to move to support him with either money or arms.

  “We are still allied to Spain,” Manchester had said to Ian privately one day as they talked in the library of the governor’s house. “Officially we are supporting Ferdinand, who is anxious to win back his South American empire. I can do nothing.”

  “I know that,” Ian had replied. “He does too, I think. It is only the people of South America who can free themselves; no outside government, however powerful, can do it for them. He is feeling a little discouraged at the moment, that is all. He will recover.”

  The Duke had looked with curiosity at this tall dark Scotsman, Bolivar’s trusted lieutenant. He could understand why the Venezuelan had been so anxious to have him come and why he had been so much more vigorous and hopeful since Macdonald’s arrival. It was an intensely arresting face the Duke was regarding so attentively, deeply tanned, the mouth firm, the cheekbones high, the dark eyes full of laughter and of violence. There was a total and unconscious arrogance about the man that made one instinctively look to him for leadership and for strength. He was so obviously unafraid for himself, had such an easy air of command about him, that his very presence was both invigorating and reassuring. “He will recover,” the Duke repeated unbelievingly. “Doesn’t that man know when he’s beaten?”

  Ian grinned, suddenly looking much younger. “Oh yes,” he had replied, “he knows. He has been beaten twice now. But he is always ready to try again.”

  “And you, Mr. Macdonald,” the Duke had asked, “will you accompany him once more?”

  “I suppose so,” Ian had answered somewhat offhandedly.