60 The Duchess Disappeared Read online

  When the Duke had pulled her to safety and held her close in his arms, as they sat on the broken stones of what had once been a window of the Tower, she had thought that he had drawn her up from a horrible and terrifying Hell into a Heaven where nothing existed except themselves.

  She had clung so desperately to her precarious hold on the boards of the sloping floor that even when she realised that she was safe it was hard to believe that she was not still battling to save not only herself but also the Duke.

  ‘I must not fall! I must not!’ she had told herself over and over again in her mind as she waited, with her whole body tense, for the next stone that Lady Morag would hurl at her.

  She was afraid that if it struck her on the head it might render her unconscious. Then she would fall as the mad woman intended and would disappear as the Duchess had disappeared in the dark waters beneath her.

  It was only later that Fiona was to learn that while the moat had been dragged after the Duchess had vanished, no one had thought of the water that seeped into the foundations of the Guard Tower.

  It had in fact been only a few feet deep, but, when Lady Morag had pushed her sister into it, the Duchess had hit her head against the stony bottom and had been knocked unconscious.

  She had therefore died from drowning, as was ascertained when they finally found what remained of her body.

  When she was first rescued, all Fiona could think of was that she was close to the Duke and that she loved him until there seemed to be nothing else in the world but him and the security of his arms.

  “You are safe, my precious,” he said, “but I might have lost you!”

  There was so much pain in his voice that Fiona wished to comfort him and yet it was impossible for her to speak.

  The shock of what she had been through had taken her voice away and afterwards she thought that she had been only half-conscious, yet at the same time vividly aware of the closeness of the Duke and her love for him.

  It took some time before the Earl could fetch men with ladders and ropes to rescue them, but Fiona felt that if they stayed where they were for an eternity, it would not be too long.

  The Duke had carried her back to her room and laid her down on the bed. Only when she had realised that he was about to leave her did she manage to whisper tremulously in a voice that did not seem to be her own,

  “Y-you – are – safe!”

  She could think only of his danger and not of what had been her own.

  “I am safe now and in the future, thanks to you,” the Duke said in his deep voice.

  Mrs. Meredith was in the room, so he could not say any more, but he lifted up to his lips Fiona’s cold hand with its bruised fingers and broken nails.

  Then he left her.

  The physician was sent for, but he merely told Fiona to rest and try to sleep.

  He gave her some medicine, but she told Mrs. Meredith how to prepare some of her own herbs, after which she slept peacefully and dreamlessly.

  The following day she wanted to get up, but Mrs. Meredith said that on the Duke’s instructions she was to stay in bed.

  “You don’t want to be round, miss, and that’s a fact!” she said. “They’re raisin’ her Ladyship’s body and Her Grace’s from the foot of the Guard Tower and His Grace’s instructions are that everybody should keep away.”

  Fiona shuddered.

  There was something horrible in thinking of the two sisters lying together dead in the water and of the terrible trouble that had been caused by the Duchess’s disappearance.

  Now she knew that the Duke was free of the suspicions that had encompassed him like a dark cloud for so long and which had grown more menacing year by year.

  “Now those who ostracised him will learn how wrong they were,’ Fiona thought and she was smiling as she fell asleep.

  Fiona was not surprised on the following day when Mrs. Meredith informed her that arrangements had been made for her and Mary-Rose to stay with the Earl’s mother and for them to leave immediately.

  She had hoped that she would be able to see the Duke alone, but when she left her bedroom wearing her travelling clothes, to walk with Mary-Rose into the drawing room, she realised why it would be impossible.

  The Duke was there, but there were six other men with him, all the Chieftains of the nearest Clans and those who had deliberately denied him their friendship since the Duchess’s disappearance.

  The Duke introduced them to Mary-Rose and then to her.

  “I am sending my niece to stay with Selway’s mother until all this unpleasantness is over,” he explained.

  “I think that is very wise of you, Strathrannock,” an elderly man said. “The Castle is not a place for women at the moment.”

  He looked at Fiona as he spoke and she thought she saw a glint of admiration in his elderly eyes. There was no doubt, moreover, that the other gentlemen were looking at her with curiosity.

  “Goodbye, Miss Windham,” the Duke said in a carefully controlled voice. “Thank you very much for bringing Mary-Rose here from the South. I am only sorry that you should leave with such unpleasant memories.”

  “All the same my visit has been extremely interesting, Your Grace,” Fiona said quietly.

  She knew this little scene was being enacted so that the Duke’s neighbours would not question her presence in The Castle or attach any particular significance to it.

  “Goodbye, Uncle Aiden,” Mary-Rose said as the Duke picked her up in his arms. “I want to come back soon and go on with my fishing. Donald says I shall soon be as good as you, if not better!”

  There was general laughter at this and they left the drawing room with the Earl, amongst a general expression of goodwill and good wishes for their journey.

  Downstairs there were two carriages waiting, one to convey Fiona and Mary-Rose, the other loaded with luggage and also containing one of Mrs. Meredith’s most trusted maids to attend to their needs.

  “Enjoy yourselves with my mother,” the Earl said as a footman put a rug over their knees, “and will you give her this note from me? Tell her I will keep in touch and let her know of everything that happens.”

  Fiona knew the message was meant for her too.

  Then, when she took from the Earl’s hand, the note he had spoken about, she found that there was not one envelope but two.

  She waited until they had driven away with Mary-Rose and could no longer see The Castle before she looked down at what she held in her hands, to know with a leap of her heart that one note was for her.

  She opened it and found that it contained just three words – three words that told her everything she wanted to know.

  “I love you!”

  After that she knew that she would have to rely on news of the Duke from the letters that Torquil wrote so dutifully to his mother.

  She realised that it was a sensible arrangement, but at the same time every nerve in her body vibrated at the thought of him and ached with her need to be close to him and to hear his voice.

  She was, however, sensible enough to know that for the next few days at the Earl’s home she must rest and get over the shock of what had happened.

  Her sister, Rosemary, who had been very experienced in treating people for all sorts of ailments, had always said that it was more important to treat shock than to bandage injuries.

  “The body will usually heal itself,” she had said in her soft voice, “but the mind is something that needs special care and is of greater consequence than anything else.”

  Because Fiona wanted to be well for the Duke and also to look her best for him, she allowed the Countess to persuade her to rise late in the mornings and to rest, as Mary-Rose did, after luncheon.

  The Earl’s castle was very different from the Duke’s.

  Being comparatively modern, it was light and airy with a very pleasant view over a valley and the garden was filled with flowers, which were the Countess’s special hobby, apart from her aviary of birds.

  “Flowers are beautiful,�
� she said to Fiona, “and we all need beauty in our lives, especially when we have come in contact, as you have, with the ugliness of human nature.”

  Looking back, Fiona now realised that she had always thought there was something unpleasant or, as one might say, ‘ugly’, about Lady Morag.

  She had instinctively distrusted her from the first moment they had met.

  Yet in a way she could understand her excessive twisted love for the Duke, which had driven her to the point where she could deliberately destroy her own sister because she wanted him.

  Fiona had pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle the process by which Lady Morag had, once she had come to live at The Castle after she was widowed, deliberately stirred up trouble between the Duke and her sister.

  It had not been difficult, because, the Countess had told Fiona, Janet MacDonald had been very neurotic and hysterical.

  “No one in their senses would have married her to a man as sensitive and intelligent as Aiden,” she had said, “but the old Duke was obsessed by his family history and the history of Scotland. Janet’s father offered him as a Marriage Settlement the return of land that the MacDonalds had stolen from the Rannocks way back in the dim ages.”

  The Countess had given a little expression of disgust as she added,

  “I often think that those who care so much about history forget how deeply ordinary people suffer in the course of it.”

  Fiona learnt that the Earl had told his mother that he had wished to marry her himself, but realised that his suit was impossible.

  “You are just the sort of girl I would like Torquil to marry,” the Countess admitted frankly one evening when they were alone after Mary-Rose had gone to bed, “but I think in some ways it will do him good to wait a little longer before he finds the right person.”

  “I do hope he does,” Fiona murmured, although she was surprised at the Countess’s philosophical attitude towards her son.

  “Torquil,” his mother explained, “is in some ways very young where women are concerned. The Duke, because he has suffered, is more mature, although they are almost the same age in years.”

  “Do you think that such suffering is important?’ Fiona asked.

  “I think that Aiden will make a far better husband than he would have made in the past,” the Countess answered. “I am sure, now that he can choose a woman he loves for his wife, that he will make her very happy.”

  “He is so – wonderful!” Fiona sighed, “and if he was of no consequence whatsoever – just an ordinary man – I should feel– exactly the same about him.”

  The Countess smiled.

  “That is what I hoped you would say,” she said, “and what in fact I know you feel. I have always wanted Aiden to be loved for himself and he really is a very special person.”

  That was the truth, Fiona told herself, and she hated, although it seemed foolish, the knowledge that the Duke’s private train was taking them farther and farther from him every mile that it steamed South.

  Mary-Rose, however, was delighted to be back on the train.

  She remembered the Stewards and the others in attendance whom she had met before, and insisted on shaking hands with the engine driver and his assistant.

  “Am I not lucky,” she asked the Countess, “to have an uncle who has his own train and the biggest castle in the whole of Scotland?”

  “Very lucky,” the Countess agreed.

  “I’ll tell you a secret, but you’ll not tell anybody?” Mary-Rose went on.

  “I promise,” the Countess answered.

  “I think your castle is really nicer than Uncle Aiden’s, but we must not tell him so, must we?”

  “No, of course not,” the Countess nodded. “That would be unkind.”

  However, when she was alone with Fiona she said,

  “I am going to suggest to Aiden when we see him that Mary-Rose comes to live with me as soon as you are married. I would love to have her and as our castle is so near, you will be in constant touch with each other.”

  “Please – please,” Fiona begged, “you are going too – hastily. The Duke has not asked me to marry him yet – so I cannot plan – ahead as if it was – inevitable. Suppose he – changes his mind?”

  “I think that is unlikely” the Countess said with a smile, “but we will wait and see. If, however, you think you can wait for your trousseau, you are very much mistaken! Clothes take time and we must be ready to do exactly what Aiden wants.”

  It was an excitement she had certainly not expected, to choose what she was sure were the most beautiful gowns anyone had ever dreamt of, while the Countess insisted on spending what Fiona thought was an astronomical amount on a trousseau that, as she said, “might have been made for a Princess”.

  “A Duchess is just as important,” the Countess reminded her, “and, as you are English, you are well aware that the Scots will be very critical.”

  “You are making me nervous,” Fiona protested. “Suppose I fail the Duke? Suppose I do all the wrong things and the Scots – disapprove of me?”

  The Countess laughed.

  “I am quite sure that your husband will look after you, my dear, and prevent you from making any mistakes. As to criticisms, as long as he thinks you are exactly what he wants in a wife, why should you worry what anyone else thinks?”

  ‘She is quite right,’ Fiona thought.

  At the same time, as the days passed and there was no sign of the Duke arriving in London, she began to feel a little tremor of fear within her that perhaps he had changed his mind.

  They had a letter from the Earl, saying that the funeral had been very impressive and it had been impossible for all the important mourners to get into the small Kirk.

  But they had all gathered in The Castle and had made such a fuss of the Duke that it had been difficult for him not to laugh at their hypocrisy and tell them exactly what he thought of them.

  The Earl had written,

  “Aiden accepted the situation with great dignity and never once showed that he had been hurt or angered by their unjust suspicions which had haunted him in the past. I think a large number of our neighbours will doubtless be more generous-minded in the future.”

  “I hope so too,” Fiona said when the Countess had finished reading the letter. “There is no doubt that they behaved abominably and only somebody who is very big in every way would ignore it.”

  “Aiden is behaving exactly as I expected him to do,” the Countess said. “Everything that concerned the Duchess is best forgotten. Remember that or you will find yourself starting new feuds and there are quite enough in Scotland as it is without anyone adding to them.”

  “You are right,” Fiona agreed. “I will try to forget, but I hate injustice.”

  “We all do!” the Countess remarked. “But like Aiden you have to be big and accept things as they are, not as you would wish them to be.”

  Fiona hoped that she could live up to such ideals. At the same time all she wanted was to see the Duke and be sure that he really loved her as she loved him.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she told herself in the darkness of the night, ‘now that he is free, he will think it more amusing to go back to the Social world from which he had been excluded since his wife’s disappearance.’

  She knew that he would be welcomed with open arms, for there were not many rich, handsome and eligible young Dukes and all the ambitious mothers would be hoping that he would fancy their daughters.

  ‘I am nobody of any consequence,’ Fiona thought unhappily.

  Yet the love she had for the Duke and he for her had been so overwhelming and irresistible that they had both been swept off their feet. Could any other considerations be of importance when all that mattered was that they should be together again?

  Because she was human she was not quite sure and the Countess complained that she was getting thinner and that her new gowns would have to be taken in at the waist, which would be a terrible nuisance since so many of them were already finished.

 
‘Please, God, make him go on loving me,’ Fiona prayed every night.

  *

  She was sitting in the drawing room of the house in London late one afternoon and was working on a piece of embroidery that she intended as a present for her hostess.

  The Countess had taken Mary-Rose to the zoo and Fiona was thinking that they were later than she had expected when she heard the door open.

  “Oh, here you are!” she exclaimed, finishing the stitch she was making in her embroidery. “I am glad you are back!”

  “That is what I wanted to hear you say,” a deep voice replied, and Fiona gave a startled little cry and rose to her feet.

  It was the Duke who stood just inside the room and for a moment she felt that he looked like a stranger.

  Then she realised that he not only looked younger and happier than he had ever done before but also she had never seen him except dressed as a Scot.

  Now, in the conventional dress of an English gentleman, he looked exceedingly smart and elegant and yet somehow different.

  They stood gazing at each other and it seemed to Fiona as if the Duke’s eyes were searching her face, looking deep below the surface as if he sought for her very soul.

  Then quite simply, without saying any more, he just held out his arms.

  She made a little sound that was all her lips could utter and ran towards him, wanting only to be close to him, to know that he was real and that he was really there.

  His arms went round her and he pulled her almost roughly against him.

  For a long moment he looked down at her face as if he could hardly believe what he saw, before his lips were on hers.

  It was then that Fiona knew that all her apprehensions and her worries as to whether he really loved her had been unnecessary.

  She knew by the touch of his lips how much he wanted her and how hard it had been for him to stay away from her so long.

  The wonder and rapture she had known before when he kissed her seemed to sweep away everything but an ecstasy that made her feel as if they were no longer in the world but were carried away into a special Heaven that had always been there when he touched her.