It certainly was. On her wedding day Beth would never have believed that two days later she would be trying to figure out ways of enticing her husband into her bed instead of banishing him from it.
“Will you be able to book another passage on the Dover packet?” Beth asked, hoping he wouldn’t notice the sudden healthy glow to her face as she observed the athletic body draped casually across the sofa. The fact that he was dressed only in thin silk breeches and a shirt, which, open at the neck, exposed the strong column of his throat and not a little of his chest, did nothing to restore her equilibrium
“Your passage was booked three weeks ago,” Alex said.
“But you said you had no intention of me coming with you.”
“I didna, but Sir Anthony did. He had to book a place for you. He couldna possibly have known ye were going to argue so badly the night after your wedding. In fact, I couldna have possibly known that, either. Details,” he said, suddenly serious. “It’s often the details, Beth, that betray men. They spend too much time looking at the whole picture, what role they need to play, what information they need to obtain, and in doing so they overlook a wee detail that sends them to the gallows.”
“Like a scar on your hand,” Beth said.
“Aye, like that. Sir Anthony wears gloves all the time, to hide the scar, as well as the fact that his hands are no’ as white and smooth as his lifestyle suggests they should be. But that night in Manchester I wasna Sir Anthony, but Alex. He doesna need tae hide his scar, and it slipped my mind that you might notice and remember it. It can happen to the best of us.”
“And are you the best?” Beth asked, half seriously.
“No, I’m no’ the best. But I’m damn good. And you’ll have to be, too. Are ye still sure ye want to do this?”
She nodded.
“I’m sure. But I’m not sure I’ll think of all the details.”
“Dinna fash yourself about that,” Alex reassured her. “I’ll see to details. What you’ve got to do is play the role of Sir Anthony’s beautiful and bored wife to perfection. D’ye think you can do that?”
“Yes, if you’ll help me,” Beth replied, sounding far more confident than she felt.
“Oh, I’ll help ye, lassie. My life depends on it, after all.”
* * *
This sobering statement stayed in Beth’s mind over the next two days, whilst Alex put her through her paces. He was more exacting than the most finicky stage director, and picked her up on the slightest gesture or expression that seemed unrealistic. It was more gruelling than she could have imagined, and she fell into bed alone the first night, all amorous thoughts banished by exhaustion, wondering if she had bitten off more than she could chew.
“No!” he shouted at her on the afternoon of the last day, when she was practising for the tenth time a scenario in which she was supposed to be exasperated by the facetiousness of Sir Anthony. “You’re no’ on the bluidy stage! Ye’ve no need to make such dramatic gestures! Christ, woman, ye look as though you’re about tae have a fit!”
He was wearing a bright scarlet outfit, powdered wig and full make-up to help her, and the sudden emergence of Alex’s voice from the rouged lips of Sir Anthony threw her completely. She had actually, after a day and a half of finding it impossible to do so, finally forgotten that he was Alex, and was therefore all the more bewildered by his outburst.
“But you said it was like acting a part on stage! You’re the one who told me to think of David Garrick’s King Lear, and how convincingly he plays it!” she shouted back at him.
This was true, and Alex’s anger subsided immediately.
“Aye, you’re right, I did. I’m sorry,” he said. “But Garrick has to make enormous overblown gestures, so that those at the back of the theatre as well as the front will be able to understand the emotions he’s trying to convey. Whereas you’ll be in a drawing room, mostly. You need to be more subtle than he is. It is like acting a part. You have to play the wife of Sir Anthony, and believe that’s what you are. Your gestures have to be normal. Just be yourself, behave as you would if married to this ridiculous dandy.” He raised a hand instinctively towards his hair, then remembering just in time that he was wearing a wig, let it fall back to his side. They sighed in unison, then laughed.
“We’re both tired. Let’s take a wee rest,” he suggested.
They were in the drawing room, and Alex sat down at one of the card tables, picked up a pack of cards, and started toying with them absentmindedly. She took a seat opposite him, and putting her elbows on the table, cupped her chin in her hands, watching him as he shuffled the deck, glad of the temporary respite. He laid the cards out face down on the table, each one overlapping its neighbour, then, turning the first card, ran one finger lightly across the top of the deck so that all the cards were now lying face up.
“D’ye remember Isabella and Charlotte showing you how to play Quadrille?” he asked thoughtfully, gathering the cards together and starting to build a little house with them.
“Yes. Why?” Beth was watching his large long-fingered hands, mesmerised by their dexterity and grace as the precarious house took shape, each card balanced with perfect precision against its neighbour.
“Ye already kent how to play, did ye no’?”
“Yes,” she answered. “I thought you suspected as much at the time.”
“Aye, I did. But it’s my business to be observant. The point is that nobody else guessed. You played the part of a novice card player perfectly. How did ye do it?”
Beth cast her mind back to the excruciating hours when she had sat with a puzzled expression on her face as Isabella painstakingly explained a rule she was already familiar with, of the stupid mistakes she had deliberately made in her first games.
“I did two things,” she said. “Firstly I tried to remember how I’d behaved when I had really been learning the game, and play as I had then, but at the same time I tried to forget that I’d ever known how to play at all. That was difficult. But I treated the deception like a joke, a challenge, if you like.”
“Right. Good. That’s how ye need to think of this. Remember how you behaved when you were with Sir Anthony before ye found out who he really was. And forget that you ever did find that out. In some ways it is a joke, and it’s most definitely a challenge.”
“But that’s the problem!” cried Beth. She raised her head from her hands, and the table shifted slightly, demolishing the delicately balanced card structure. “It’s not a joke! I’ve got to get this right, or not come with you at all. And I do want to come with you, more than you know. I don’t want to be buried in the country somewhere and grow old without having ever done anything worthwhile with my life! But this isn’t like playing cards at all. If I’d made a mistake over that and Isabella had found out I knew how to play all along, she’d have been hurt. But I wouldn’t have sent a man to hang because of it!”
Alex realised now his mistake. By taking her to the hanging he hadn’t succeeded in his aim of deterring her from accompanying him. He had badly underestimated how important it was to her to be actively involved in the Jacobite cause. But he had frightened her enough for her to be trying too hard to get things right, terrified that he would refuse to allow her to come with him if she didn’t, or that she would condemn him if she made one tiny error.
“Beth,” he said, abandoning the cards and reaching across to capture her hand instead, “you’re trying too hard. You dinna need to convince me that you can do this. You proved that on Tuesday when your cousins called. Ye played the part perfectly, and adapted quickly too, when you found me in the library. If I thought the risk too great, I wouldna let ye come to Europe, no matter what I had to do to stop you. I’ve frightened you too much, blethering on about torture and hangings and suchlike. It is a serious business, I’m no’ denying that. But sometimes ye have to treat it like a joke, take chances. You have to relax. If you’re tense all the time, ye canna be convincing. Many mistakes can be covered up. It was a mistake to come i
nto the library with Isabella and Clarissa. You covered it up, and I helped ye by falling in with what ye decided to do.”
“Angus helped there as well,” Beth admitted. She was enjoying the feel of his warm hand enfolding hers, comforting, sensual. “If he hadn’t spoken, I think I’d still be standing there now, frozen.”
“Aye, well, now there’s an example of someone treating the whole thing as a joke and getting away wi’ it. He kent I was in the library all along.”
“What?” said Beth. “Why didn’t he tell me, or steer me to another room?”
“Because he wanted to give ye a chance to prove your acting abilities. And because he thought it’d be amusing to embarrass his older brother. It’s no’ the first time he’s done something of the sort, and it’ll no’ be the last time either, unfortunately. I’m no’ suggesting you approach this in the way Angus does. He can be a wee bit too flippant at times, to say the least, but in general he does well, because he doesna take himself too seriously, and can behave naturally because of that. That’s what ye need to do. And ye’re no’ alone, remember. I’ll be there to help you, and so will Angus for that matter. He’s coming along as my personal servant.”
She felt the tension dissipating, partly because of his reassuring words, but also due to the pleasant languor that was slowly permeating her body as he lazily stroked her hand.
“We can have another try at that scene, if you like,” she said half-heartedly. “I feel a lot more relaxed now.”
His eyes met hers and held her gaze, then he smiled slowly, knowingly, the dimple in his cheek clearly visible even through the layer of paint. He hadn’t applied his usual patch to cover it, she noted absently.
“No, not yet,” he said. “I dinna think you’re ready to think of me as Sir Anthony just now. I’ll go and get us something to eat.”
He relinquished her hand, placing it on the table, and standing, left the room. Beth felt as though she’d been doused in cold water. She sat looking at her hand resting on the polished walnut surface where he had left it. She had been certain he had been going to lean across the table and kiss her. She had needed it, yearned for it, had seen her desire mirrored in his eyes.
She must have read the signals wrongly. She was hardly an expert in matters of love, she reflected ruefully. She had certainly read Lord Daniel badly.
By the time Alex returned from the kitchen with wine, freshly baked bread and cold beef, Beth was sitting calmly on the sofa, her composure seemingly restored. They ate in companionable silence for a few minutes. Alex had temporarily removed his wig, saying it was making his head itch, and the copper strands in his tousled hair caught fire in the late afternoon sunlight.
“So how did you get to become Sir Anthony?” Beth asked. Having now seen a considerable amount of Alex, she could not think of anyone further removed from him than the flouncing, effeminate baronet.
Alex emptied his mouth and took a deep draught of wine.
“Aye, well, that was partly my own fault. When we were bairns my father taught us all at home, when it was practical, that was. He was an educated man himself, and didna want us to grow up knowing nothing other than fighting. However, it came to the point where he’d taught me all he could, and so I was sent off tae university to learn more. He couldna really afford it, our circumstances being a wee bit difficult at the time, but he thought that if I got a good education, I could teach Duncan and Angus too, and he’d get three for the price of one. So by one means or another, he raised the money, and off I went.”
“Is that where you acquired Sir Anthony’s English accent, at Oxford?”
Alex smiled at her with amusement.
“Christ, no, a ghràidh, ye’re forgetting that Catholics are no’ allowed to go tae British universities. I went to Paris instead. That’s where I learnt French, among other things.”
Alex finished his roll, then left his chair and moved across to the fireplace, throwing a log on and manoeuvring it with the poker until it started to burn merrily. Beth watched him from her place on the sofa, her bare feet curled up under her, thoroughly relaxed now.
“It was in the cheap student taverns that Sir Anthony was discovered,” he said, replacing the poker in its stand.
“I can’t imagine Sir Anthony drinking in a cheap Parisian tavern,” Beth said. “Didn’t he complain about the poor quality of the wine and the bad service, not to mention the appalling roughness of the chairs, which pull the threads in one’s clothes so abominably?”
“Not in those days, he didna,” replied Alex, straightening up from the fire, laughing. “He wasna so privileged then. He wore plain homespun breeches, woollen shirts, and second-hand coats. He had very little money, ye ken. But what he did have was a remarkable talent for mimicking people, from unpopular professors to Walpole and even the king himself. No one was safe from his lampooning. It was just a wee bit of fun, and it paid for my wine. Until the E…until the man who was to be my sponsor saw one of my performances. It wasna the sort of place a man of quality would normally frequent, but he’d arrived in Paris late at night, in pouring rain, having broken down along the way. We’ll no doubt experience the same thing ourselves when we’re abroad. He took a room at the first inn he came to, and arrived in time to see me standing on the table, finishing off a portrayal of a French macaroni who had just been splashed by a dung-cart, before launching into a creditable and pretty unflattering imitation of our glorious King George discussing the philosophy of farting with Aristotle, German accent an’ all, to great applause. The next morning I was called into the chancellor’s office.” He smiled as he remembered how terrified he’d been when he’d been told who the expensively dressed man in the chancellor’s office was, and that he’d witnessed Alex’s parody of the monarch.
“I nearly pissed my breeches, I was that feart,” he said, smiling “I thought I was going to be expelled at the least, and knew my father’d kill me if I was.”
But instead, after the chancellor had made the introductions and invited the shaking student to take a seat, he had left the room, leaving the young Scot and the man who was to be his sponsor to become better acquainted.
“When he told me what he wanted me to do, I refused at first,” Alex said. “I told him I didna want to skulk around in mansions and palaces, that I didna ken anything of the society life, that what I kent was how tae use a sword and an axe, and that I’d already proved I wasna afraid to kill, if I needed to.”
Alex’s tone made it clear to Beth, as it had to his sponsor then, that he had killed a man already, maybe several men. He looked up at her, intercepted her look.
“That was seven years ago, Beth. I’ve killt a good many more men since then. Does that disgust ye?”
“No,” she said sincerely. She would have probably killed the Scot in Manchester, if his reactions had not been so fast. “But you were very young, only twenty-three, was it?”
Twenty-three. The same age she was now.
“Twenty-one,” Alex corrected her. “I’m twenty-eight now. Two years younger than Sir Anthony. Angus is nineteen, and he’s killed, as well. It’s a necessary part of life, if you’re a MacGregor.”
Was it? Why? She wanted to ask, but she also wanted to find out about Sir Anthony.
“Who is your sponsor?” she asked.
He hesitated, but only for a moment.
“Better you dinna know that,” he said. “Dinna think I mistrust you, but if anything does go amiss, the less you ken about such things, the better. He’s rich, very rich, and he’s a Jacobite. And if I’m caught as a spy, I’ll no’ betray him, and he’ll no’ lift a finger to help me. It’s part of our agreement, and I accept it. No one else knows his identity, no’ even Duncan or Angus.”
She wouldn’t push him to reveal the name. It would do no good anyway.
“So, how did he persuade you to change your mind?” she asked instead.
“By wearing me down slowly, telling me that lots of men could fight, but not many had the skills I had. It was ov
er a year before I agreed. The students used to put on plays and such, just for the other members of the university, and in one of them I played a character called Lord Foppington. He came to see the play, and Sir Anthony was born. Well, no’ the name Sir Anthony, that came later, but the character. After that I left university and went to Germany, so that I could learn to speak the language, while my sponsor worked out a suitable identity for me.”
“And it took him six years to invent Sir Anthony?” Beth asked. She knew the flouncy baronet had only appeared in London society just over a year ago.
“No,” Alex replied. “My circumstances changed. My father died, suddenly, and I had to go back to Scotland.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Beth said. “Did you have to take over the family business?” That was what the eldest son normally did when his father died. Alex’s mouth twisted in a wry smile.
“Aye, in a manner o’ speaking,” he answered, eyes dancing.
“What is the family business?” Beth asked, suspicious now.
“Cattle reiving, mainly. And trying to avoid being killed by the Campbells, or anyone else who’s a mind to. My father was the chieftain. I succeeded him.”
“The Campbells,” Beth whispered. They were the bogeymen of her childhood, the demons from hell her mother had told her of, the men who had slaughtered her grandfather and many other MacDonalds in cold blood fifty years before, burning their houses and leaving Beth’s grandmother and mother, then aged only two, to fend for themselves in the February snows and sub-zero temperatures.
“I remember now,” she said softly, as Alex fixed her with a look which was a mixture of curiosity and concern. She glanced over at him. Dusk was falling, and the light from the fire glowed warmly in the room. In a short while they would have to light candles. “My mother always told me that no matter what the Campbells had done to us, it was nothing compared to what they’d done to the MacGregors.”
The Mask Revealed (The Jacobite Chronicles Book 2) Page 11
