72. The Impetuous Duchess Read online

  “Surely, Jabina, you know our laws better than that?

  “Marriage by Declaration in front of witnesses is completely legal in Scotland and the moment that Sir Angus spoke he and the lovely Jean were in truth man and wife!”

  There was a moment’s silence and Jabina was conscious that the Duke was standing still as if turned to stone.

  “I am sure that Your Grace knows of our Scottish customs,” Lady McCairn went on. “For instance if you and Jabina had not been married before you stayed with us, you are now legally and irrevocably man and wife.”

  There was a glint of malice in Lady McCairn’s eyes as if she half-suspected the truth.

  Neither Jabina nor the Duke spoke until they reached the front door.

  “Goodbye, Jabina,” Lady McCairn said. “It has been delightful having you and your husband here, and I hope that whenever you are visiting Scotland again we may offer you our hospitality.”

  “You are very kind,” Jabina murmured.

  The Duke shook hands with Sir Ewan and then with Lady McCairn. He too expressed his thanks and they climbed into the carriage.

  They were covered with fur rugs and the foot warmers were hot beneath their feet.

  Higman flicked the horses with his whip and they set off down the long drive.

  The Duke did not speak.

  Jabina glanced at him from under her eyelashes.

  His chin was set square. His lips were pressed together in a tight line. He looked very stern and very angry.

  After some moments, as if she could no longer bear the silence, she said in a very small voice hardly above a whisper,

  “I am – sorry.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Duke did not answer.

  He was fighting for control of his temper.

  Never in the whole of his life had he felt more like hitting somebody or swearing profanely.

  He could hardly believe it was true that he, who had firmly made up his mind not to marry, should suddenly find himself in the position of being married to a girl of whom he had little knowledge and whom he found extremely irritating.

  A surge of impotent fury made everything round him seem red and he had an almost irresistible impulse to take Jabina by the shoulders and shake her until her teeth rattled.

  Then the cold logical part of his brain that had always controlled all he did, told him that this would achieve nothing.

  What had happened could for the moment at any rate not be changed and, although he felt that there must be a legal loophole somewhere, he could think of nothing save the fact that his wife – the Duchess of Warminster – was seated beside him.

  He looked so fierce and so grim in his rage that Jabina was awed into silence.

  She was not used to people who were emotional.

  Her father was a dour man, who since her mother’s death had communicated little with her save in monosyllables.

  Anyone else might have been cast into despondence by the life she had led, but in fact Jabina’s natural buoyancy and vivid imagination had helped her to survive what had undoubtedly at the time been a depressing loneliness.

  Her father’s house was set in the midst of his estate with a three mile drive to the nearest village.

  With only aged servants to talk to, some of whom had been there in the time of her grandfather, Jabina was starved of companionship and had found some compensation by peopling her world with her own fantasies.

  Because she craved excitement, she made everything an adventure.

  The first wild primrose of spring was a moment for wild elation. A strong wind blowing across the moors became in her mind a typhoon that might take the roof off the house and leave them open to the elements and shivering in their beds.

  When she went riding, she would imagine herself to be one of her ancestors riding into battle against the English or at other times, as she turned for home, she was a Chieftain’s daughter fleeing from the Vikings who would abduct her and carry her across the sea as their prisoner.

  When she was not studying, for her father insisted on her having a good education, she was reading, and naturally the books that excited her most were romances of all sorts.

  She identified herself with the heroines and lived through every adventure, sighed every sigh, wept every tear. And if, as so often happened in the books, the heroine died of a broken heart, Jabina herself felt that her life was finished.

  It was a vicarious existence and, had he known of it, it would have clearly explained to the Duke her habitual exaggerations and her love of the dramatic.

  But nothing she had experienced through the lives of her heroines in fiction or history had prepared Jabina for sitting closely in a jolting carriage with a man who was obviously incensed to the point of violence and who showed a white line of fury above his pressed lips.

  She wanted to try to explain that she had, of course, completely forgotten that Marriage by Declaration was a lawful way of being wed in Scotland.

  She had heard about it and read about it. But when she had said in answer to Lady McCairn’s question that the Duke was her husband, she had not for one second intended it to be anything but a small white lie.

  A lie by which she could gain time to extricate herself from the uncomfortable predicament of being found alone in a damaged coach with a young gentleman.

  The only experience Jabina had had of men, or indeed of Society, had been the previous year when, three months after her seventeenth birthday, her father had taken her to Edinburgh for the Season.

  There as a debutante she had been invited to balls and assemblies and had discovered that she could both attract and entertain men.

  The younger men who attended such social gatherings were not particularly outstanding. In fact to Jabina they seemed rather gauche, unpolished and without many brains.

  But there had been older men who, because she was animated and gay and stood out even amongst girls who were more classically beautiful, had flattered her and convinced her that to them she was very alluring.

  Jabina had been strictly chaperoned. Her father had seen to that!

  Nevertheless when she returned home it was with a new self-confidence and a feeling that outside the full rather dismal world she lived in there was another, exciting, exhilarating and desirable

  She had also learnt during her visit to Edinburgh, how to handle her father a little better than she had done in the past.

  She realised that a man could be coaxed, flattered and beguiled into doing what a woman wanted him to do and she had managed to persuade her father that it was his duty to take her to Edinburgh again this May.

  Then like a bombshell came the proposal from Lord Dornach!

  Jabina had hardly noticed his Lordship. He was a friend of her father’s, a frequent visitor to the estate for the shooting and who dropped in when he was passing the house on his way to Edinburgh or visiting other friends in the vicinity.

  She thought him dull and almost as dour as her father.

  His Lordship had a habit of pausing before he spoke which Jabina found annoying, because she was never quite certain, having asked him a question, whether he had heard it or was pondering on what should be his reply.

  She had always thought of him as her father’s friend and when one day, Sir Bruce told her to come to his study after Lord Dornach had left the house she had obeyed blithely having no idea what was in store.

  “I have something of great importance to tell you, Jabina,” her father began, having cleared his throat.

  “Yes, Papa. What is it?”

  “Lord Dornach has offered for your hand in marriage and I have accepted on your behalf.”

  For a moment Jabina thought that she could not have heard aright and that her father must be making some obscure joke. Then, as the full force of what he had said penetrated her brain, she gave a little cry of sheer horror.

  “Marry Lord Dornach, Papa? I would not think of it!”

  “I don’t intend to argue on this matter, Jabina
,” her father replied. “I have given it my serious consideration and I think that his Lordship is exactly the right husband for you. I shall be glad to know that you will be in safe hands.”

  “But he is old, Papa – far too old to marry someone of my age!”

  “That is a matter of opinion,” her father replied. “You are inclined to be flighty, Jabina, and, as I have told you before, you are far too impetuous and impulsive. You need an older man to protect you.”

  “I don’t want protecting!” Jabina almost shouted. “I want to marry someone I love! Someone I can have fun with.”

  “There is nothing more to be said, Jabina,” Sir Bruce had said coldly. “Lord Dornach will call tomorrow and you will receive him pleasantly and confirm my agreement that you should be his wife!”

  “I will not! I will not marry him!” Jabina cried, stamping her foot.

  “Do not speak to me in such a manner,” Sir Bruce said icily. “Go to your room, Jabina, and stay there until you are in a better frame of mind. You are an extremely fortunate young woman and there is no more to be said on the matter.”

  “I will not do it, Papa!” Jabina hissed through gritted teeth.

  “You will do as you are told!” Sir Bruce answered. “I am your father and you will obey me. I have nothing more to say to you on the subject.”

  He walked from the room, closing the door behind him, and Jabina had sunk down trembling on the hearthrug in front of the fire.

  She was afraid of her father. She always had been. He had always seemed unapproachable and even more so since the death of her mother.

  But even her mother had never been able to sway him once he had made up his mind.

  Jabina knew by the inflexion in his voice and the determination in his expression that, battle though she might, she would finally walk up the aisle and marry Lord Dornach.

  She put her hands up to her face despairingly.

  How could she bear it? How could she tolerate not only the man, whom she positively disliked, but also the life she would lead as his wife?

  She knew Dornach Castle. A gaunt stone edifice, cold and drear, with thick walls three feet in width and dark, cheerless rooms that seemed somehow like the dungeons that lay beneath the castle itself.

  She thought of Lord Dornach touching her and felt herself shiver with a fear that she had never known before.

  He was as dark and frightening as his castle.

  She had a feeling that, once incarcerated there, she would scream with fear and no one would hear her.

  “I cannot marry him – I cannot!” she whispered to herself.

  Yet the following day when Lord Dornach came to visit her she could not defy him as she wished to do.

  It was only in her thoughts that she said the words that she told the Duke she had spoken aloud.

  In actual fact with her father present she had stood with downcast eyes while Lord Dornach had slipped a heavy diamond ring on her finger.

  It had belonged to his mother and Jabina could not help noticing that it needed cleaning while the setting was heavy and rather ugly.

  “I feel sure we shall be very happy,” Lord Dornach said ponderously after some thought.

  “My daughter is shy,” Sir Bruce said when Jabina did not answer. “It is not surprising, considering the honour that your Lordship has accorded her.”

  Lord Dornach had looked down at Jabina’s white face and for a moment she thought of appealing to him to let her go and not to want her as his wife.

  Then some new instinct that she had lately developed where men were concerned told her that he did really desire her in that capacity.

  It was nothing he said.

  It was just that there was some flicker at the back of his eyes that was more frightening than if he had taken her in his arms.

  She knew then that while she had never noticed him particularly, he had certainly noticed her.

  She could not mistake the feeling she had about him.

  It was the same as her reaction in Edinburgh when men clasped her hand too long or came too near when they were talking and which she had sensed lay behind the flattering words they said to her.

  Then it had been an excitement to know that she could arouse an emotion she did not quite understand, but was aware that it was a masculine response to her femininity.

  What had been exciting and amusing in a young man was to Jabina revolting in a man old enough to be her father.

  She had a wild impulse to turn and run away from him.

  Only when she was at last alone and her father had taken Lord Dornach away to look at the horses in the stables had she known what she must do.

  It had taken her some time to put her plan into action.

  First she had thought that she might simply leave the house and journey to Edinburgh to find one of the friends she had made the previous Season and ask if she could stay with her.

  But she realised that her father would simply fetch her back and the situation would not change.

  She would merely be more closely guarded and confined until the day she walked into the Kirk to become the wife of Lord Dornach.

  It was then she remembered that her aunt, her mother’s sister, whom she had loved as a child.

  Jabina had only to think of something to glamorise it and want to do it immediately!

  To think of her aunt living in Nice was to conjure up a haven of security in which it would be impossible for her father to find her.

  She had a feeling, although she could not be certain, that he did not know her aunt’s address.

  She had certainly never communicated with him since her sister’s death, but she used to write to Jabina on her birthday and at Christmas.

  Sometimes too when war did not prohibit it, presents arrived from France, which was to Jabina a very special and thrilling treat.

  There had been a pair of thin suede gloves with pearl buttons, fashioned by nuns were nightgowns of finest muslin, inset with lace and made with such perfect tiny stitches they might have been the work of fairy creatures.

  There had been lace-edged handkerchiefs and other gifts all in exquisite taste, which were just the type of personal adornment to please a growing girl.

  “Aunt Elspeth will understand,” she told herself, “that I cannot marry a man like Lord Dornach, however rich and important he may be!”

  She had a feeling that if she once reached her aunt she would be able to find in the South of France the young man of her dreams.

  He would be handsome and laughing, a man with a twinkle in his eye, who would tell her not only of his admiration but also of his love.

  She wanted to hear someone speak of all the things that had never been spoken of in her home. She wanted to be flattered, to feel not once but a thousand times the strange breathless excitement in her throat when a man said, “you are very lovely!”

  But now she was married to a man who had made it quite obvious that he detested her.

  Jabina could hardly bear to think of it.

  For a moment she contemplated screaming aloud that she had not meant this to happen and she could not endure the thought of the future.

  The Duke was not at all the type of young man who had featured in her dreams.

  When she thought of his stiff unbending manner, the way he disapproved of all her exaggerations, of her boasting and most of all of her running away from home, she felt that Fate had played her a dirty trick.

  She had escaped from Lord Dornach only to marry what seemed to her at the moment to be no better than a younger version of him.

  ‘What can I do? What can I do?’

  It seemed to Jabina that the wheels, as they rolled over the rough roads, were repeating the words over and over again.

  Then she had an idea.

  “Do you think – ?” she began aloud.

  The Duke turned to look at her as if for the first time.

  Almost instinctively Jabina shrank back to the corner of the carriage.

  His face was c
ontorted with anger. This was not the phlegmatic quiet man she had found rather boring and pompous ever since they had first met.

  This was a man angry to the point of violence, his eyes flashing at her and his voice harsh and bitter as he exclaimed loudly,

  “You will be silent! We will discuss this when I have had time to think about it. For the moment I do not wish to hear your chattering voice and foolish comments!”

  He turned his face from her to stare straight ahead and for once Jabina was abashed into silence.

  They drove on without speaking until at noon they drew into the yard of a Posting inn.

  The Duke alighted and requested a private parlour, only to be told that there was none available and, if they wished to partake of a meal, they must take it in the communal dining room where there were already a number of guests.

  To Jabina it was a relief that she did not have to sit alone with him in silence or alternatively hear him rage at her.

  With a quick swing of her emotional temperament after having been cast into dark despondency at the Duke’s anger, now her spirits rose a little, especially as she realised that she was feeling hungry.

  As usual the menu consisted of Scotch broth, tough mutton and a suet pudding that was as heavy as lead!

  But there was some excellent cheese and Jabina with the healthy appetite of the young ate heartily.

  She noticed that the Duke only picked at his food and drank, with a wry expression on his face, the inferior wine that was the best that the inn could provide.

  She had the feeling and rightly that his head was hurting him and that he had found the jolting of the carriage extremely uncomfortable.

  But he had told her not to speak and, with a great effort, she bit back the words as they came to her lips and managed to remain silent.

  Instead she contented herself with watching the people in the room and, as was her wont, making up stories about them. She could not help wondering what they thought about her.

  She and the Duke certainly looked out of place amongst the roughly dressed sheep farmers and slick commercial travellers who accounted for the majority of the inn’s other customers.

  Within an hour of their arrival they set off once again and now there was no doubt that the Duke was suffering.