The Duchess Disappeared

Chapter One 1870-2

She saw Mr. McKeith’s eyes look at her questioningly and she explained,

“I have no intention of allowing Mary-Rose to go to Scotland and certainly not alone, if that is what you intend.”

Her voice was hot with anger and Mr. McKeith replied quietly,

“My instructions, Miss Windham, are to convey Mary-Rose and her nurse or Governess to Rannock Castle.”

“She has neither!” Fiona snapped.

“Then the obvious person to accompany her there must be you, Miss Windham!”

Mr. McKeith’s statement was so startling that Fiona stiffened and was very still.

Then, as she stared at him, her eyes dark with anger and very wide in her oval-shaped face, he smiled in a manner that seemed for the moment to illuminate his expression.

“I shall be interested, Miss Windham,” he said, “to see if, when the time comes, you will put your case concerning Mary-Rose as bravely to His Grace as you have just put it to me.”

His words seemed to release some of the tension that had held Fiona captive.

“I shall not be afraid of the Duke, if that is what you are insinuating, Mr. McKeith,” she replied, “and let me make it clear, I am concerned only with the happiness of my niece, a condition which I beg leave to doubt she will find at Rannock Castle.”

“That of course remains to be seen, but I would be greatly obliged, Miss Windham, if we could start our journey to Scotland as quickly as possible.”

Fiona rose to her feet and walked across the room to stand at the window and look out into the garden.

She felt as if her mind was in a turmoil.

She had never expected for one moment that such a thing might happen. Because she had hated the Duke and all the Rannocks who had treated her brother-in-law so badly, she had found it wiser to make Scotland a barred subject.

Yet sometimes she had known that Ian yearned irrepressibly for the land of his birth.

When August in England was hot and airless and the garden was wilting for want of moisture, she had known by the expression in his eyes that he was thinking of the mists on the hills, of the grouse winging their way over the heather and of the burns tumbling down the glens in a silver cascade.

It was then that she would notice that her sister would be more gentle and if possible more loving than at other times, trying, Fiona was aware, to make up to her husband for all that he had given up for her.

It seemed impossible that the feud, as Fiona called it, should have continued for eight years from the moment Ian had said that he was going to marry Rosemary until he and his wife had been killed in a train accident.

At the time it had seemed an adventure to travel to London by train instead of, as they had done for years, by carriage, Ian driving with an expertise that had made Fiona long for him to have better and more expensive horseflesh.

He had in fact seemed completely content with what he possessed and never showed in any way that he regretted giving up his connection with the great castle and the huge estate known as Rannock Land for a small English manor house standing in a few acres.

It was true, Fiona had often told herself, that no two people had ever been as happy as Ian Rannock and Fiona’s sister.

He had fallen in love – and she had heard the story so often – when he had least expected it and in the most unlikely circumstances.

“I was walking down Bond Street when it began to rain,” he had related to Fiona. “I looked for a Hackney carriage, but, of course, there was not one to be seen. The rain looked like it was becoming a torrent, so I sought shelter in a doorway, wondering how long I would be marooned there.”

He always paused at this point as if to make it more dramatic.

It was then that I heard the strains of music and realised that somebody was playing a piano. It was so beautiful and at the same time seemed so insistent that I started to listen. Then I saw that I was standing in the doorway of a Concert Hall. The rain was still teeming down so I decided I could well pass the time by listening to the music.”

“And overcoming your Scottish caution about spending money, you actually bought yourself a ticket!”

“It was a small price to pay to see someone who could play so exquisitely,” Ian replied.

“But you did not expect me to be a woman,” Rosemary interposed at this point.

“Of course I did not!” her husband answered. “I was convinced that I would see a long-haired man and doubtless a foreigner.”

“And instead?” Rosemary asked.

“I saw an angel!” he replied. “The most beautiful and exquisite angel I could ever have imagined!”

Within a week of their meeting, Fiona had been told by her sister, they were so wildly, crazily in love that there was no question of their ever again living separately.

Ian wrote to his father, announcing that he intended to marry Rosemary Windham.

Because he was in all things honest, he explained that, because she had an extraordinary musical talent and her family was hard-up, she had been persuaded to give a number of public recitals and the music critics had proclaimed her talent as exceptional, even at times using the word ‘genius’.

As if Ian knew what the Duke’s reaction would be, he had planned the marriage ceremony before he had received a reply.

In fact the old Duke categorically and violently forbade him to marry a woman who was “a Sassenach, an actress and doubtless at the same time a prostitute”.

Ian had been shaken by the letter, even though knowing his father he had half-expected it, but Rosemary had been devastated and had clung to her father, weeping bitterly.

“How can I marry him? How can I spoil his life?” she cried. “Equally, how can I live without him?”

That had been impossible for either of them to contemplate and they had been married, Ian knowing that his father would never forgive him.

When the Duke died two years later, Ian was sure that his brother, whom he had always loved, would get in touch with him and the barrier that had prevented him from visiting his home would be lifted.

But there was no communication of any sort from the new Duke.

Gradually, Fiona knew, the hope that had risen in Ian’s heart died and he faced the fact that he was exiled for life from The Castle and from his Clan, who were still, whether he wished it or not, an intrinsic part of his life.

“If only his brother could be a little more understanding,” Rosemary would sometimes say to Fiona. “How could anybody cut Ian out of their life when he is so wonderful in every way?”

She gave a little sob as she added,

“He never says anything against the Duke. He is never bitter and yet I know in my heart how much he minds.”

Thinking of this now, Fiona told herself that the Duke of Strathrannock must be an insensitive brutal man.

Being a Scot, he must understand just how much Scotland meant to his brother and yet he could go on punishing him for loving a woman who was in fact not an actress but rather a very gifted musician.

Because she hoped that it would make relations better between Ian and his father, Rosemary had given up her public career as soon as they were married.

She played now only to her husband and her sister and later, as she grew older, to her daughter.

It was a deep sadness to both Ian and Rosemary that they had only one child, but Mary-Rose was so angelic in every way, a ‘dream-child’, her father called her, that she completely made up for the lack of brothers and sisters.

Now, when Fiona was thinking of her, almost as if she had drawn her by her thoughts, the door of the drawing room opened and Mary-Rose came into the room.

“Aunt Fiona!” she cried in her lilting voice. “I have found the honeysuckle you wanted. See, I have a whole basket of it!”

She ran across the room without being aware that anyone was sitting by the fireside and Fiona turned from the window.

As she had done so often, she thought that her niece looked like a small angel who had just dropped out of Heaven.

Ian Rannock had thought that Rosemary looked like an angel when he had first seen her sitting at the piano on the stage of the Concert Hall, seeming too small to evoke so much sound from a grand piano – and Mary-Rose was the creation of their love.

Delicately boned, with a small round face and large blue eyes set wide apart, she had hair rioting about her head in curls that were the colour of the first fingers of dawn.

It was impossible for anybody who saw Mary-Rose for the first time not to stop and look at her and then look again and Fiona could see now the astonishment in Mr. McKeith’s eyes.

“That was very clever of you, darling!” she said as she took the basket of honeysuckle from Mary-Rose. “And now I want you to say how-do-you-do to a gentleman who has come all the way from Scotland to meet you.”

Mary-Rose gave a little start – then, seeing Mr. McKeith, she walked across the room to him.

She dropped him a little curtsey and held out her hand.

“I’m sorry I didn’t notice you when I came into the room,” she said, “but I was so excited at finding the honeysuckle that Aunt Fiona wanted for her magic herbs.”

Mr. McKeith rose a little laboriously to his feet to stand holding Mary-Rose’s hand in his.

“Magic herbs?” he questioned. “What are they?”

“Herbs that make people well when they are ill! Some people think Aunt Fiona is a ‘White Witch’!”

Mary-Rose laughed as she spoke and it made her look even more like a small angel than she did already.

Fiona drew in her breath.

“Mr. McKeith, dearest, wishes us to travel to Scotland with him so that you can meet your uncle, the Duke of Strathrannock.”

“Would that be Dadda’s brother?” Mary-Rose asked.

“Yes,” Mr. McKeith answered.

“I know all about Uncle Aiden,” Mary-Rose went on. “He lives in a big castle where Dadda used to play as a little boy. It has towers where the Rannocks fought to keep away the wicked invaders who wanted to steal their cattle and sheep.”

Fiona was astonished.

“Did your Mama tell you that?” she asked.

“No, it was Dadda,” Mary-Rose replied. “When we were alone, he would tell me stories of Scotland and his home and what he did when he was the same age as me.”

Fiona understood then that Ian had felt he must talk to someone about the land he loved, the place where he had been born and bred.

To do so to his wife would make her unhappy because Rosemary would then feel how much he had given up for her. So he had talked to Mary-Rose, although until this moment Fiona had no idea of it.

“I am sure you will find it very interesting, Mary-Rose,” Mr. McKeith said, “to see The Castle where your father was born and to meet the people who loved him when he was a boy.”

“Are we really going to Scotland?” Mary-Rose asked.

“You would like that?”

“It would be very exciting! But I couldn’t go without Aunt Fiona “

“She will travel with you and stay with you at The Castle.”

Fiona was feeling that, although he spoke reassuringly, there was a momentary mental reserve behind the words that he did not say aloud.

‘I will not let the Duke take Mary-Rose away from me,’ she thought fiercely.

She told herself that she had always hated him and now her feeling for him was one of positive loathing.

“Does Uncle Aiden look like Dadda?” Mary-Rose enquired.

“I think you will see a resemblance,” Mr. McKeith answered. “But His Grace is a few years older than your father and he has not been happy in his life.”

“Why not?” Mary-Rose asked.

“I think the answer is that he does not possess a daughter like you,” Mr. McKeith said with a smile.

“That means he is lonely,” Mary-Rose reflected wisely. “Mama said we must always be very kind to people who are lonely, like poor old Mr. Benson in the village, whose wife died and whose son was killed in a battle.”