Island of the Swans (56 page)

Reynolds let the ear trumpet he was holding fall to his side.

“You’re a quick-thinking, coolheaded woman, Your Grace,” he replied kindly, “and I especially appreciated your concern for my paintings. If my house still stands, I trust I’ll see you in a fortnight for our next sitting? Your court gown will look magnificent, I promise you. A capital choice of garment, I must say!”

Jane summoned a smile to her lips and nodded farewell to her fellow escapees, who looked as pale and shaken by what they had just experienced as she felt. Tiredly, she turned and slowly walked up to her front door, wondering what the ultimate damage of this day’s events would be for the House of Gordon.

The Fourth Duke of Gordon arrived at the leased house in St. James’s Square ten days later. As soon as Alex had received Jane’s frantic summons, he hurriedly departed from Glasgow where he had been living since Christmas, preparing to review a home guard of Fencibles he had raised at the king’s request. Around the time France had formed an alliance with the American Revolutionaries, the Duke of Gordon had responded to His Majesty’s bid to recruit yet another regiment. At that point, the government was worried that the French might dare to actually invade England, even as far north as Scotland.

Exhausted from his breakneck journey to London, Alex listened silently in the library as Jane gave her account of the shocking affair involving his brother, George Gordon, who’d been arrested and clapped in the Tower of London.

Even some of Alex’s close friends had been among those attacked and manhandled by the mob. Lord Germain had had ale thrown in his face, and the Bishop of Lincoln’s throat had been squeezed so ruthlessly by a ruffian, the poor man had spouted blood from the corners of his mouth.

Something had to be done about Lord George, and done
quickly
, Alex knew, or the future prospects of every member of their immediate family would be ruined.

“Well, I suppose we shall have to cope with it on the morrow,” he said wearily. “I’ll just finish my brandy and look over a few things on my desk. Good night, Jane.”

Rebuffed, she watched him take up his quill pen and jot down a few notes. She had been dismissed and, cut to the quick, she retreated upstairs. Within the hour, she heard him pass her door and retire to a bedchamber down the hall, as had been his custom since the birth of Louisa. Trying to take her mind off the myriad of troubles besetting her, Jane reached for a copy of Fanny Burney’s
Evelina
, hoping a second reading would provide an effective diversion.

The spires of the Tower of London stood out starkly against the leaden skies. The hot weather of the previous week had reversed itself. The heavens were about to unleash the downpour that had been threatening all day. Soon, a light rain began spattering fitfully against the handsome black carriage, its door emblazoned with a gold stag’s head crest. The carriage passed the barrel-shaped Lion Tower and drew to a halt next to another coach that had also paused in front of the gated entrance to the prison.

Jane studied her husband’s profile, his composed features giving no hint of the turmoil he must be feeling. Following the riots that had ripped through London for five days, Alex’s brother had become this bastion’s most celebrated inhabitant, and it didn’t bode well for any of them. Glumly, Jane sank back against the padded upholstery lining the carriage, waiting for the footman to open the door. No charges had yet been lodged against Lord George, but when they were, no doubt it would be for High Treason.

Jane saw the wiry figure of the barrister, Thomas Erskine, descend from his carriage. She had engaged his services before Alex had arrived back in London, and since her husband hadn’t challenged her choice, she assumed he considered it a wise one. The famous defense lawyer took shelter from the rain under a gray stone archway, standing with his cloak held tightly beneath his chin.

Thanks to the change in the weather, and the harsh military response ordered by the king during the worst of the disturbances, the city at last was quiet. However, the scars of the tumult—now dubbed by the press and the people, alike, as the Gordon Riots—were everywhere to be seen.

Alex and Jane merely nodded to Erskine, with whom they’d conferred at their house in St. James’s Square earlier in the day. The three walked silently through the Tower gate. They were escorted through another gate by a yeoman warden, resplendent in scarlet livery and white neck ruff.

Jane grimly attempted to assess the overall damage wrought, in part, by the man they were about to visit. Nearly five hundred people had been killed or injured in the melee. Several beautiful Catholic chapels had been gutted by fire, their sacred altars and wooden pews tossed out on the cobbled streets. Many of those same thoroughfares still had deep potholes created when the rabble dug up the paving stones and tossed them at those unfortunates not wearing the Protestant blue cockade.

Jane sighed as they were led through the Tower’s inner courtyard. She paused to stare at a large wooden block. Its top edge was partially hollowed out, allowing a head to rest there comfortably, if its owner were kneeling. The yeoman followed her gaze, which rested on an outsized executioner’s axe suspended nearby from a wall of Portland stone.

“Last time that little charmer was used was in Forty-seven,” the yeoman offered cheerfully. “Lopped off the ’ead of the Fox—Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, one of Charlie’s lads. Did a fine, proper job o’ it, I can tell you that! We just hang ’em, these days,” he added sadly.

What a pity they didn’t lop off his son’s head, while they were at it, Jane thought to herself, staring straight ahead and following the men up a gloomy, winding stone staircase in the forbidding Waterloo Barracks. Simon Fraser, Master of Lovat, was now an M.P. for Inverness as well as a Commissioned General in the 71st Fraser Highlanders. Nevertheless, he continued to sit out the American War and she’d heard he was currently in London to attend the House of Commons. He was probably among those calling for George Gordon to be hung by the neck until dead, she thought glumly.

The ducal couple and their lawyer, Thomas Erskine, stood quietly in the drafty stone corridor as the yeoman pulled a large key from his pocket. He inserted it into a square iron lock on a massive wooden door with bars crisscrossing a window in its center. From inside they could hear low moans and sobs, punctuated occasionally by a high-pitched wail.

“Oh, God… Oh, my God!” the voice cried.

“His lordship’s been doin’ poorly, Your Grace, I’m sorry to report,” the yeoman commented. “Seems he claims he never intended to incite a riot. But he sure did a good’n, wouldn’t you say? We’ve hung twenty-one of the buggers so far. Often we builds the gallows right at the spots where they committed their mischief!”

Jane peered through the bars on the door as the yeoman struggled with the ancient lock. Lord George, pale and emaciated, paced up and down his gloomy cell, agitatedly running both hands through his thinning hair. He turned and stared as they entered the chamber, and then sank his head into his hands and turned away.

“I believe you know Mr. Erskine, George,” Alex said quietly. “He is going to try to help you, but you must do exactly as he says.”

“Look… look!” the younger man whined, pointing out a small window set into the thick stone wall of his cell. “Oh, God! Is that to be my fate?”

Jane stood on tiptoe and gazed out at two men in rags, hanging by their broken necks from a scaffold erected outside the prison walls. Their faces were of a bluish hue, and their bodies twisted slowly in the freshening wind that heralded the approaching storm.

“Hanging’s certainly a possibility, unless you follow my instructions to the letter,” Erskine replied mildly, sitting down on one of two narrow cots pushed against the granite walls. “To begin with, sir,” Erskine said briskly, “I’ll need some information about precisely what you said when you addressed the throng at St. George’s Fields on Friday, June the second…”

An hour later, Jane and Alex were back in their carriage for the return trip to St. James’s Square.

“Erskine may just do it!” Jane said excitedly, believing for the first time that the situation wasn’t absolutely hopeless.

“Do what?” Alex asked, pulling the coach curtain back an inch to stare moodily out the window at the steady downpour.

“Succeed in getting your dotty brother acquitted, that’s what! He’ll manage it as long as no other hard evidence suddenly appears which proves that Lord George intended to commit the felonies which were enacted by the mob. ’Tis a perfectly brilliant defense!”

“I hope it works,” Alex replied glumly.

“And what about the rest of us?” she persisted. “What are we to do while this case drags on, as ’tis bound to?”

Alex shrugged. “We go on as before.”

“We can’t go on as before,” Jane countered. “No one will speak to us… no one will have us in their homes… your friends will snub you in the House of Lords and at your club… and worse.”

“There’s not much we can do about such things, Jane,” Alex replied with his usual remoteness.

“Oh, yes there is!” Jane said suddenly. “We can apologize!”

“Apologize? For what?” he said testily. “I was in Glasgow during the riots, drilling His Majesty’s Fencibles, and you were… well, I have no idea where you were, but let’s merely hope you were committing no transgression worthy of capital punishment!”

Stung by his veiled accusation, Jane remained silent for a moment and then spoke in a voice that vibrated with intensity.

“I know there are many things between us, Alex, about which we have remained silent,” she said, forcing him to look at her. “They have festered and eaten away at our marriage. But this business concerning Lord George threatens the very House of Gordon! I don’t want that, and you don’t want that for either us or our children—especially young Huntly. I think ’twould make a great difference in the public’s opinion of us if we went to each and every person of importance who was damaged by the disturbances, either in their person or property, and told them how sorry we are for this misfortune. We can pay calls together or separately, but I think it should be done.”

The sound of the horses’ hooves and the patter of the heavy rain on the carriage roof grew louder in the silence that hung between them. Alex pursed his lips a moment, lost in thought. Then he looked at her and smiled wryly.

“You’re a clever lass, Jane Maxwell. Bold and clever. You recruited lads for Hamilton’s regiment when the Highlands had been bled dry and the scheme you’ve suggested to save our sorry reputations just might work. Are you willing to risk being rebuffed by every aristocratic family in London?”

“That I am, Your Grace,” she replied, looking at him steadily.

“And despite our… estrangement… these past years, you are willing to stand by my side?”

“Aye,” she said slowly. “For the past four years I’ve wanted to do just that, m’lord.”

Alex continued to return her measured glance for what seemed like an eternity before he spoke again.

“No need to address me so formally, my sweet,” he said finally, bending forward to take her face gently between his hands. “I am, after all, your husband,” he murmured with studied irony. “You do still acknowledge that, don’t you, Jane?”

She nodded, remaining silent and staring across the carriage at the enigmatic man to whom she’d been married almost thirteen years.

His hands brought her face inches from his and he kissed her lightly at first, and then with a hunger stoked by denial. Like a man possessed, his lips sought her eyelids, her cheek, the hollow of her throat. She allowed the effects of his urgent lovemaking to wash over her.

Give it up, she told herself for the thousandth time, praying that the magic of his hands and lips would banish all thoughts of Thomas Fraser from her brain. Alex’s touch was achingly familiar, and yet she almost felt as if she were watching from afar as her husband passionately kissed someone else. Then, mercifully, a quickening took hold deep inside her. An arousal of sensation so long held in check finally supplanted the jumble of half-thoughts whirring inside her head, and she surrendered to the warm waves of pleasure Alex had always been able to call forth from her.