Island of the Swans (6 page)

Thomas felt his eyes grow moist and his throat began to ache.

“You owe it to their memory to reclaim these lands… not just for them, or Clan Fraser, but for the villagers like your wet-nurse as well.” Simon turned back to face Thomas, and he squinted in the dim light. “The Frasers of Struy did their duty to their tenants and the villagers for generations. Without a working manor, the entire region has become as derelict as Struy House itself. If something isn’t done in the next ten years, the people will leave the land for the south, or worse, for America. Tis your destiny to bring it all back to life, Thomas Fraser! To help restore
our
way of life here in the Highlands!”

Thomas glanced around the hovel and felt his heart sink. He thought of the hulking mansion in the valley below, with its caved in roof and weed-choked gardens.

“Godfather… how can we hope to—”

The master of Lovat’s gaze grew hard. “You’ll get your Commission in the Black Watch somehow… then, mayhap, the Crown will need good fightin’ men in those insolent Colonies and we’ll raise another Fraser regiment… but you’ll get your lands back by dint of your fighting arm! Never let
anything
stand in the way of your duty to your heritage, lad, do you hear me? I’ve done my best by you all these years, just so you can salvage what your da and m’lady Marguerite paid for with their blood!”

Thomas stared, aghast to see his godfather’s cheeks suddenly bathed with tears to match his own. The elder man abruptly spun on his heel and strode out of the dim chamber. By the time Thomas had remounted his pony, Simon’s horse had thundered across the rain-spattered moor. Soon, man and rider were swallowed up by the emerald wood.

Three

O
CTOBER
1765

T
HE SOUNDS OF THE WAKING CITY DRIFTED UP TO
J
ANE’S FOURTH
-story window. Outside, denizens of the neighborhood’s teeming jumble of flats and shops were already up, taking advantage of the unusually warm October weather to move about the city in lightweight attire before the onset of another of Edinburgh’s treacherous winters.

Still half-asleep, Jane listened to the symphony of noises along the cobbled High Street. She could even hear traffic noises in the distance, clattering down St. Mary’s Wynd. The steady drone punctuated from time to time the shrill, singsong calls of the hawkers selling their wares.

Suddenly, Jane felt such a longing to see her friend Thomas Fraser that her throat tightened. The vibrant city that once held such joy and enchantment for the two intrepid explorers, now seemed almost forlorn during his long absence. Jane stared up at the ceiling, feeling dreadfully lonely, despite a house crowded with her kin.

It was wonderful having a semblance of a normal family life once again, Jane thought, attempting to cheer herself out of her gloomy musings. Uncle James, her father’s brother, was a career captain in the Black Watch regiment. He was always welcome at Hyndford Close, not only because he insisted on helping with expenses when his brood visited Edinburgh between army assignments, but because the three Maxwell sisters thrived in the warm affection he and his wife Elizabeth expressed toward each other, their children, and their nieces and nephews. Their two boys, Murray and John, provided companionship for Eglantine, as they were just her age, and Jane, for the first time in years, had found in her Aunt Elizabeth someone in whom she could confide.

Aunt Elizabeth had wanted the lying-in for her new baby to take place in Edinburgh. Their old family friend and doctor, Sir Algernon Dick, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, would see that she got the best of care. Jane had watched her aunt’s belly grow round and hard over the weeks, and Aunt Elizabeth calmly answered her persistent questions about the mysteries of how babies were created and came into the world.

The door to Jane’s low-ceilinged bedchamber opened abruptly, and through half-shuttered eyes, Jane observed her mother in the entranceway.

“I want you three lasses up and dressed and down to breakfast
right now
!”

Lady Maxwell’s crisp tone carried unusual urgency. Jane sat bolt upright in bed. Almost sixteen, she’d grown so tall, she nearly tumbled fourteen-year-old Eglantine, who had been sleeping dangerously close to the edge of the mattress, onto the floor. At the same time, Jane thought she heard a muffled moan coming from the direction of the hallway past her mother.

“Is the bairn on the way?” Jane asked excitedly.

Lady Maxwell looked at her sharply. She had not heard any of the talk between Jane and her sister-in-law concerning pregnancy.

“That’s none of your affair, missy,” she replied, looking crossly at the three patched linen shifts hanging on the walls on wooden pegs. She wondered how she would ever outfit her pretty daughters to make the good matches they deserved, let alone provide dowries for them.

“As soon as you’ve dressed and had some porridge, I have a number of errands I want you three little maids to do in town. Fiona will go with you.”

“But I’ve promised to help Hector in the garden!” Jane protested. She had so looked forward to pulling up the last of the autumn vegetables and gathering in the remaining herbs, their pungent and spicy odors tickling her nose.

“Hector Chisholm has dug turnips for seventy-odd years, my dear,” her mother responded acidly. “He will accomplish his tasks on his own today, just as you’ll complete the ones I’ve planned for you three. Now quickly—all of you! Dress and join me downstairs. And I want no nonsense today from
you
, Mistress Jane!”

With that, Lady Maxwell turned on her heel and quickly shut their door, but not before Jane was positive she had heard the guttural sounds of someone in great pain wafting toward her from the far end of the hallway.

“She
is
having the baby!” Jane exclaimed excitedly.

“It must hurt something terrible… listen!” Eglantine whispered fearfully. “Aunt Elizabeth sounds like—”

“An injured animal,” Jane completed her sentence for her. “She said that women make those sounds to help them bear the agony, but that the pain comes in waves, with little rests in between as the body pushes the baby out. Thomas told me sheep do the same thing.”

“You spoke of this subject with Thomas?” Catherine asked incredulously, patting her face dry with a rough linen towel hanging next to the basin.

Jane shrugged and began dressing.

“It was a long time ago… before he left.”

Jane involuntarily glanced down at the remnants of the forefinger on her right hand. The small red stump still pained her when the bitter weather set in, and she never looked at her hand without feeling the loss anew. First, she’d lost her finger, and then she’d lost her best friend. After Thomas had departed for the north at the behest of his godfather, Simon Fraser, the tight-knit community around Hyndford Close had done its best to cheer her up. Jane had wandered her Edinburgh haunts alone, refusing to speak to anyone for weeks.

Pulling her linen shift over her head this surprisingly balmy October morn, Jane counted on the fingers of her good hand. It had been just two years since she’d seen Thomas, and five years since her accident during the final pig race down the Royal Mile. Grasping the bedpost while Catherine laced up her stays, Jane smiled to herself over the news imparted to her by Hector just the previous day that the few servants left at Master Simon’s flat had been instructed by post to remove the dust covers from the furniture and air out the upper rooms in preparation for the owner’s arrival any day. Perhaps, thought Jane excitedly, I can pry some word of Thomas from the old goat—or at least from the kitchenmaid, who was rumored to be more familiar with Master Simon than her below-stairs duties would require.

“Aren’t you ready yet, Jane?” Lady Maxwell asked impatiently, reappearing suddenly at the bedroom door as her two other daughters obediently filed out of the chamber.

“Yes, Mama,” Jane replied, quickly donning the linen stomacher that was far too tight for her budding torso.

It wasn’t that her breasts were so terribly large, she thought ruefully, it was just that their definite roundness couldn’t be contained in the bodice of a dress she had inherited from Catherine two years before. After all, Jane realized, she would be sixteen on the last day of this year.

“Here, Fiona,” Jane announced, handing the results of their morning shopping efforts to the Maxwells’ housemaid. “Take these back to Hyndford Close. If Mama demands we stay away till teatime, we might as well enjoy this fine weather. Come on, m’dears… let’s stroll around Nor’ Loch and watch them work the tanning pits.”

“Och!” cried Catherine shuddering. “The smell’s enough to make a person sick! The boilin’ tannin, and the stink from the loch itself. ’Tis the town’s cesspool, that’s what it is, pure and simple.”

“Oh, ’tisn’t
that
bad,” protested Jane, who loved the bustle and excitement around the tannery and slaughter houses.

The foul odors were a necessary part of curing hides, Jane thought matter-of-factly. Besides, this brae overlooking the road heading north to the Highlands provided an excellent lookout post for spotting travelers entering town.

Jane didn’t particularly relish an encounter with Simon Fraser, who had always gazed at her with a hard look, more suitable for a soldier about to smite his adversary. Still, she might glean some word of Thomas’s welfare. She bit her lip. What if Thomas thought her childish and uninteresting, now that he’d learned the manly arts of swordsplay and musketry? Well, thought Jane, jutting her chin in the air,
she
could read French fairly well, and do her sums.
I’m not a completely ignorant dolt, like most lasses
, she thought smugly. As Jane gazed down at the loch’s turgid waters, she wrinkled her nose.

“Just think of it,” she mused aloud. “Swans swam here during Queen Mary’s time.”

“Well, eels swim there
now
,” replied Catherine, grimacing. “This time of year, with the waters so low, the dead ones will be everywhere. I can’t think why you like going there, Jenny!”

“I heard from old Mr. McClellan, the fishmonger, that years ago the water bailiff discovered a trunk just below the surface on the east end,” Jane noted casually, hoping to pique her sisters’ curiosity and thus stimulate an expedition down Ramsay Lane to the water’s edge.

“What was in it?” shivered Eglantine with excitement.

She was a child born with a sense of drama and was forever begging Jane to act in little theatricals she had fashioned from her vivid imagination.

“
The skeletons of a man and woman…
” Jane whispered melodramatically. “’Tis said they were brother and sister and had committed incest. They were drowned for their sins on order of the Kirk Elders.”

“What’s incest?” inquired Eglantine with a puzzled frown.

“Jane, really!” Catherine protested with all the dignity of her eighteen years. “All right,” she added quickly, veering away from such an unsavory topic, “let’s go down to the loch bank, if you promise we’ll stay far enough away from the tanners to avoid the smell.”

The three Maxwell girls left Fiona—struggling with packages they’d piled high in her arms—in the Lawnmarket district and proceeded down the steep descent from Castle Hill along the brae, which overlooked what remained of North Loch.

In times past, the waters had been considered picturesque, lying in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, which had been built on the sheer granite cliff, hundreds of feet above the loch’s dark, flat surface. For centuries, the loch—a large pond, really—had served as a place of punishment even more forbidding than the gallows. Women suspected of being witches had been bound hand and foot and thrown into its murky waters.

Catherine sniffed the air suspiciously as the three sisters approached a sharp rise overlooking a series of long, rectangular tanning pits that had been erected at water’s edge. After two to four days of soaking the leather hides to soften and swell them, the fleshy residue was then removed with sharp-edged scrapers. The skins were then suspended in boiling caldrons filled with a tanning solution made from powdered chestnut bark and removed methodically from one vat to another, with each pit holding a stronger solution than the one before to achieve the desired color for the hide.