Dynasty 8: The Maiden: The Maiden (The Morland Dynasty)

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘The whole of Scotland is behind the Prince,’ Allen said. Jemmy looked thoughtfully at him, at the eagerness, the spot of bright colour on each cheek, the hands twisting together in excitement. ‘No one there wants the Elector. A huge army is marching towards Perth at this very minute, and the King of France is certain to send help. Speed is of the essence—’

  ‘You want to go?’ Jemmy said abruptly. Allen looked at him half apologetically, half defiantly.

  ‘I do, I admit it. It is my only chance to get back my estate. Aberlady, Birnie Castle, Braco – everything that should be mine, in the hands of the Elector and his cronies. I could be a rich man, an independent man. Oh Jemmy, I know you have been very good to me, given me a home, treated me like an equal, and I am very grateful, you must not think I’m not—’

  ‘You have no need to be grateful,’ Jemmy said. ‘You have given Morland Place far more than it has given you, in your service and your care. I do not know how we should have managed without you, brother.’

  Allen looked down. ‘I am not really your brother. We share no blood.’

  Jemmy laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘You are more a brother to me than any that share my blood. I shall miss you more than I can tell you, but I do see that you must go. Go then, and with my blessing.’

  Allen looked up, and laid his hand over Jemmy’s. ‘I will never be able to repay you—’ he began, but Jemmy stopped him.

  ‘Repay what? There is no debt, my friend. Now, you must tell me what you will need – horses, money, servants. When do you want to leave?’

  ‘In the morning,’ Allen said, almost shamefacedly. ‘As I said, speed is of the essence.’

  ‘So soon? Well, it shall be done. We’ll prepare everything tonight, and you can leave at first light. I envy you, in a way.’

  ‘Envy me?’

  ‘The adventure. The excitement. When I was only a child, I ran away to fight for King James, in the year ‘15.’

  ‘Yes, I have heard the story.’

  ‘I didn’t get very far, I suppose you heard that too,’ Jemmy said ruefully. ‘Brought back very bedraggled, with my tail between my legs. Oh but I remember how I felt the day I went! How high my heart was, how alive I felt. I don’t think I have ever felt quite so good since then. You are lucky in that way, to have nothing to lose. I could not go now, however much I wanted to. Possessions are a privilege, but they are also a duty.’

  Allen nodded sympathetically, and then said, ‘If we – when we come south, what will you do? Will you join us?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. We must wait and see.’ He smiled suddenly. ‘I can imagine what Lady Mary would say about it. You had better keep your departure a secret between you, me and Clement, I think, until you are safe away. When you get to the Prince, I should be glad if you could try and send me word, that you are safe.’

  Early the next morning, before the sun was up, Jemmy witnessed Allen’s quiet departure. He was taking one servant with him, an eager young man named Colin, who was half Scottish and a Roman Catholic, and had a great interest in the restoration of the true King. They were both well mounted and well armed, and had a sufficiency of money with them, hidden about them and their packs in case of highwaymen. They had a mule to carry their baggage, which they were keeping to a minimum, together with some spare arms and powder and shot as Jemmy’s contribution to the cause.

  Jemmy clasped his brother tightly in his arms and bid him farewell.

  ‘God bless you!’ he said. ‘I pray God keep you safe, and bring a good outcome to the venture.’

  ‘I will send word when I can,’ Allen said, and turned back as he was about to mount to add hesitantly, ‘Jemmy, just one thing – Lady Strathord – Marie-Louise—’

  ‘What about her?’ Jemmy asked, hiding a smile. ‘Do you wish me to make your adieux for you?’

  ‘No – not that. But I wish you would keep an eye on her. She was talking – at the ball, you know – about going to join the Young Chevalier if he came to England.’

  ‘Join him?’

  ‘Yes – God knows what she meant, but I wish you would look after her, and make sure she does not do anything foolish. She talks about her brother in such a way – and you know how spirited she is …’

  Jemmy looked a little alarmed, but he said soothingly, ‘I will see to it. She shan’t come to any harm. Now you had better be off, before the house is roused. God go with you, Allen.’

  ‘With God’s help, I shall be a rich man when next I see you,’ he said with a grin, and in a few moments the two men had clattered away into the dawn mist, with the mule between them, its packs swaying.

  Jemmy lost no time in riding over to Shawes, partly, he had to admit, because he had sooner be out of the way when Lady Mary discovered that one of her household had done such a shocking thing as to go to the aid of the Pretender. He was really more curious than worried about Marie-Louise, for he could not imagine what she, a woman, could hope to do to aid the cause. When he arrived at Shawes he was told she was with her priest – Father Renard still served the household – so he waited for her in the drawing room. The house seemed strangely silent, and he soon fell into a reverie, remembering the many evenings he had spent in this room with Annunciata and Aliena. Over the marble fireplace was a portrait, taken by Kneller in 1719, of Annunciata seated, with Aliena standing beside her and Marie-Louise, a baby of two, sitting in her lap. The baby was holding out its hands towards its mother and laughing, and Aliena was leaning slightly forward with her hand out, as if about to take the child from Annunciata’s lap, but her eyes were looking outward, at the artist. It was a poor picture of the baby, and Kneller had painted Annunciata more as he remembered her than as she was then – Jemmy worked it out in his head that she must have been over seventy – but the likeness of Allena was excellent. Jemmy gazed and gazed, and the dark-blue eyes of the painting gazed back into his, and the lips seemed on the brink of smiling, or speaking; he grew almost hypnotized, and the rest of the room grew dark, so that there were only the eyes, and her remembered voice speaking, saying …

  ‘Well, sir, and what can bring you here so early in the day?’

  No, it was not Aliena, of course, it was Marie-Louise, who had come into the room unseen behind him. Jemmy shook his head to clear it, and turned to see Marie-Louise, already dressed in riding habit, standing where a bar of sunlight from the window touched her hair. He had never been able to discover whether she did those things deliberately. He scanned her face eagerly, but her resemblance to her mother was a fleeting thing that came and went like sun-shadows over the grass, not to be defined or captured. She looked, he guessed, much more like her father: which brought him to the matter in hand.

  ‘I wondered if you had heard the news from Scotland,’ he said casually.

  Marie-Louise raised an eyebrow. ‘If you had been a more frequent visitor, you would have known the answer to that question; you would have been able to discuss it with me. But somehow or other – I don’t know how it is – you have been a stranger here since the birthday ball. I could almost think you have been avoiding me.’

  ‘You know that I have. You know why,’ Jemmy said in a low voice. ‘I thought it best for both of us if—’

  ‘Yes, that is like you, to run away from the problem,’ Marie-Louise said, but without malice. Jemmy frowned.

  ‘It is not running away, to acknowledge that there is nothing that can be done, either to recall what happened or to make amends for it.’

  She smiled and shook her head. ‘Is that how you see it? Well, if things had been different, I would have shewn you what we could do. Your wife, for one thing, is barren, and you have no son. Good enough reasons, I would have thought, for putting her away.’

  ‘Putting her away?’ Jemmy cried in amazement. ‘What can you mean? What…’

  ‘Peace, Master Morland: as I said, things are different now. I have more urgent matters to attend to. My brother is at this very minute marching south; he is probably already in Perth
, where he will gather the lowland tribes before moving on to Edinburgh—’

  ‘That is what I wanted to talk to you about, Princess. Allen said—’

  ‘Allen?’

  ‘He has gone to join the Prince,’ Jemmy said, a little reluctantly. He would as soon not have told her of Allen’s departure, if her mind really was on going, in case it encouraged her. But, after all, she would very soon know anyway. ‘Before he left he asked me to look after you. He said you had spoken to him of going to join the Prince when he landed.’

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded calmly. ‘I did say that.’

  ‘But you didn’t mean it?’

  ‘I never say things I don’t mean,’ she said, walking to the window and sitting down in the windowseat. The sun made her copper hair a nimbus around her head. Jemmy stared.

  ‘But what for?’ he asked. ‘What could you possibly do to help?’

  ‘What Allen is doing, I suppose.’

  ‘But Allen is a man. If you were a man, I would say, go to it, I would wish you luck, but you are not.’

  ‘I am as good as any man you care to name,’ she said, still calmly. ‘I am young, strong, healthy, a fine horseman; I am rich, independent, and master of Shawes. I am a man in everything that matters.’

  ‘You are not!’ Jemmy cried, growing angry. ‘You cannot fight for the Prince, nor lead his soldiers, nor even help to organize his camps. You cannot even ride that far – Good God, it is two hundred miles or more! It would be far too dangerous. You would never get even a quarter of the way before being attacked and robbed, or losing your way – there are no roads in the north, you know, nor signposts, nor houses and inns to rest in Even if you reached the Prince, you would only be a burden. There is only one sort of woman that travels with an army. There is only one thing a woman can do in time of war.’

  Now Marie-Louise grew angry. She stood up, her golden eyes blazing in her pale face. ‘You are very free with your condemnations, sir. You are very knowing about what I can and cannot do. I should be glad to know, sir, on what authority you think to tell me my business.’

  He spread his hands. ‘Don’t, Princess, don’t be angry. You know why I am anxious – because I care for you and your safety. But you did not, I am sure, mean to try to travel to Scotland. You know that there is nothing you could do.’

  She looked at him speculatively for a moment, and then said more peacefully, ‘I know that there is nothing a feeble woman could do, of course. But there is my money. I am very rich, and the Prince will surely need all the money he can get. My jewels, for instance. Father Renard might take my jewels to the Prince, to be sold to buy arms.’

  Jemmy almost grinned with relief. ‘I knew it, I knew you could not be so foolish. Yes, your money could help the Prince, that’s true. It is a pity Allen could not have taken it for you, but you did not know he was going. But would Father Renard be the best person to go? He is not a young man, after all. We could surely find someone else to take your jewels to Scotland.’

  ‘I am sure you are right,’ Marie-Louise said. ‘We must think what we can do. Someone else, someone younger than Father Renard will go. My dear Jemmy, I have not offered you any refreshment. I am forgetting my duties as hostess! Let me call for something – some wine? Or a dish of chocolate?’

  Jemmy let her change the subject, glad to have won so bloodless a victory. In the back of his mind was a nagging worry that she had given in too easily; but, as she had emphasized, she never said anything she didn’t mean. Well, he would keep an eye on her, just in case, and ask Father Renard to do the same.

  In the afternoon Marie-Louise had another visitor, a much more surprising one: Jemima, very pale in the face, and very anxious.

  ‘I slipped out unnoticed,’ she explained to Marie-Louise’s surprised question. ‘It wasn’t difficult to do today – there is such a fuss about Allen’s going away. My mother is furious. She says it is an insult to her brother, who is our patron, and she won’t believe that my father didn’t know about it, or that he couldn’t have stopped Allen. But you can’t stop people when they really want to do something, can you?’

  ‘No,’ Marie-Louise said. ‘You can’t.’ Jemima’s face cleared, and she almost smiled.

  ‘I knew it! You are going, aren’t you? Oh, it’s all right, I won’t tell anyone. Papa only told me because he thinks I don’t count,’ she said it sadly, but without bitterness. ‘He told me that he’d been to see you and he’d persuaded you to give up the idea. But I didn’t believe it. I knew that you would not change your mind just because he asked you.’

  ‘It seems you know me better than he does,’ the Princess said rather grimly. She was looking with new eyes at the thin, earnest child, wondering if grandmother had not been right after all in her assessment. ‘So what is it you want? I cannot imagine that you have come here just to see if you were right. I hope you don’t want me to take you with me.’

  Jemima flushed. ‘Oh no! Although I would love to go. I do envy you so, being free to do what you want. It’s so terrible being a girl. I mean—’ she became confused, afraid she had insulted Lady Strathord, but Marie-Louise laughed.

  ‘It’s all right. I know what you mean. So you would like to come with me, eh?’

  ‘Oh yes! To fight for the true King! I know I’m only thirteen, but Papa did it when he was not much older than me, and if I was a boy—’

  ‘Is that what holds you back? That you are a girl?’ Marie-Louise was curious.

  ‘Not really,’ Jemima said sadly. ‘It’s because – well, I’m the heir to Morland Place. There’s only me, and Alien talked to me often about the estate, and how the Master is like a father to his people, and if I am to be father, or mother, I can’t just go, can I? I can’t just abandon them? It would be wrong.’

  ‘No,’ Marie-Louise said thoughtfully. There was a great deal more to this child than she had supposed. She found herself rather approving of her. ‘Well, what is it you want, then?’

  ‘He went – Allen went – without anyone knowing. I would have liked to say goodbye, and wish him good luck and – but I had no chance. I wanted to ask you, when you see him, to give him something from me. I suppose you will see him?’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ Marie-Louise said, holding out her hand to receive the small object the child held out. ‘What is it? Can I see?’

  ‘If you like.’

  The Princess unwrapped the small square of cloth, and saw inside the gold locket that Jemima always wore, the locket that Jemmy had had made to enclose the lock of hair that Annunciata had left her.

  ‘Your great grandfather’s hair?’ she asked, puzzled. Jemima blushed again, more deeply.

  ‘No – I took that out. I wouldn’t part with that. And anyway, it would not mean anything to Allen. I put in a lock of my own hair instead. As a – a sort of—’

  ‘A talisman?’ Marie-Louise asked. Jemima nodded. The Princess folded the cloth around it again and pushed it into her pocket through the placket-hole. ‘I will keep it safe, and give it to him.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Jemima said, and turned to go, but paused and looked back, curious in her turn. ‘The Prince of Wales really is your brother? As the servants say? You really are a Princess?’

  ‘I really am.’

  ‘And what will you do, when you get to Scotland?’

  ‘I will give him the money I have brought, and I will fight for him, and for my father, the King,’ Marie-Louise said simply. ‘I will put on a man’s clothes, and cut my hair. I am a better horseman and as good a swordsman as any of them, and who has a better right?’

  Jemima sighed a sigh of pure satisfaction. It was better than any novel; and Marie-Louise reflected that the little girl, at least, did not see anything impossible in the idea.

  ‘I shall pray for you, every single night,’ Jemima said. ‘And for Allen. Will you give him – give him my love?’

  ‘What good do you think you can possibly do?’ Mary cried, almost shouted in her frustration. Jemmy ran a distracted hand thr
ough his hair. He had already done it so many times that it was standing up like a bush.

  ‘I must catch up with her and bring her back. For God’s sake, Mary, surely even you can see that?’

  ‘She has had more than a day’s start on you. How can you catch her up? How can you even know which way she has gone?’

  ‘She will have had to hire guides – she could not even get through the Forest of Galtres without a guide. It will not be difficult to pick up her trail. A woman, especially such a woman, will not pass anywhere unnoticed.’

  ‘Do you not think she will have had the sense to cover her trail?’ Mary said. ‘And besides, if she wants to go, why should you risk your life following her to bring her back against her will? It is the height of absurdity. I utterly forbid it, do you hear? I forbid it!’

  Jemmy stared at her, too distracted to be angry.

  ‘What are you talking about, forbid it? You cannot forbid it. And you cannot seriously think that I would simply do nothing, shrug my shoulders and forget it? A helpless, unarmed woman, alone in a hostile country—’

  ‘Helpless? Unarmed?’ Mary came a step towards him, and actually lifted her stick as though she would strike him. ‘She is a demon! She is no more helpless than a wolf or a lion! I pity any man who comes up against her, yes, and I pity you, you poor, bemused fool! You have run after her all your life, fetching and carrying, cringing at her feet, and now you would risk your life too, and for what? You are mad, you Morlands, mad and tainted, every one, tainted with the blood of that evil woman, the Countess. Generation after generation, mad and tainted. I never wanted to marry you, I never wanted to be allied to such a family of traitors, but at least I thought you might be grateful. It is my marriage to you which has saved this family, don’t you realize that? My blood, my brother’s intervention, that has kept you from prison or the rope. But you don’t think of that, do you? You want to throw away everything I have given you, for that evil woman’s progeny, for the bastard daughter of a bastard daughter of a whore!’