A Heart In The Highlands

4-1

4My Lady Wrexham was bored. She shut her eyes against the swaying of the coach, but her mind was active and she found it impossible to relax. It seemed to her that she had been jolting over bad roads, fording swollen rivers and being held up by floods for an endless length of time. She felt bruised and battered and utterly fatigued, and her red lips tightened ominously as her head rested against the blue satin upholstery of her coach – a sign, her maid thought, watching her timidly from the other side of the coach, that boded ill for somebody.

A bad rut in the road caused the coach to bump more than usual and Beatrice Wrexham sat bolt upright.

“A plague on it!” she exclaimed. “Will this journey never end?”

“The coachman was certain that we should reach Aviemore by five o’clock, my Lady,” the maid ventured timidly.

“Aviemore!” Lady Wrexham made the name sound like a swear word. “We have many miles to go beyond Aviemore and we are a day late as it is.”

“The floods were uncommon bad in Yorkshire, my Lady.”

“I know that, you fool. Heaven knows why I was insane enough to undertake a journey such as this!”

Beatrice Wrexham threw herself petulantly into the corner of the carriage. She – as well as Heaven – knew the answer to her own question. The reason she had undertaken the long journey from London to Scotland was because, success or failure, what she would receive would make it worthwhile.

Yet now she wondered if any sum of money, however vast, or any jewel, however valuable, was worth the endless exhausting monotony of being a traveller. Few people journeyed in such luxury, but then, if Beatrice Wrexham, the most beautiful and by far the most notorious woman in England, could not command comfort, who could?

Beatrice yawned, then taking a small gold-framed mirror from her reticule, she scrutinised her face. She might be tired, but her reflection showed no sign of it. There was no doubt that she was beautiful. The milk-white skin, the deep blue of her eyes, the almost classical perfection of her features seemed to have no flaw in them, and her hair, which was the colour of ripe corn, rippled, unpowdered for the journey, high upon her head, making a halo for the exquisite heart-shaped contour of her face.

Yes, she was beautiful! But how cleverly and successfully had she exploited that beauty!

Beatrice yawned again, her red lips parted to reveal her even, pearly teeth. She held out the mirror to the maid.

“Put it away, woman,” she said sharply, “and take good care of it. I am told that Scotland is full of thieves and robbers.”

“Oh, my Lady, are our lives likely to be in danger?” the woman quavered.

“I swear I would welcome danger at this moment,” Lady Wrexham answered, “if it did ought to relieve my ennui.”

The maid sniffed and quivered with fright at the thought of what lay ahead of them, but Beatrice Wrexham closed her eyes again and for a moment there was a faint smile on her lips. She had never been afraid of danger. She had supreme belief that her own plausible tongue and the enticement of her beautiful body would carry her through any difficulty, however perilous, however unpleasant.

And she had just cause for such confidence. For ten years she had used her womanhood as a man might use his sword – a weapon to gain her whatsoever she desired.

At twenty-five Beatrice had come to the full blossoming of her beauty. As she closed her eyes, she could see herself as a child of fifteen, innocent, unsophisticated and unpolished, yet already lovely and with a promise of still more beauty to come.

Her mother had brought her to the Court of St. James, openly defying her father’s wishes in the matter. He was an unimportant, impoverished country squire, the owner of a dilapidated manor and a few acres of land in Kent. Beatrice had neither noble birth nor wealth to assist her, but she had an ambitious mother and a magnetic, irresistible beauty.

Her mother was friendly with one of the Queen’s ladies in waiting, and presuming on that friendship, she pleaded and implored the unfortunate lady until she obtained permission to bring Beatrice to St. James’s.

Beatrice might have been innocent in some ways at fifteen, but she would have been deaf and an i***t if she had not understood very clearly and without pretence what her mother desired for her.

They had taken a stagecoach from Sevenoaks to London, as they were too poor to afford a post chaise. Every penny they could scrape together or borrow from their equally impecunious relations had been expended on Beatrice’s wardrobe. Even then they were heavily in debt, but supremely confident that the future would enable them to pay their dues.

They were not mistaken. Beatrice’s beauty did not go unnoticed and within a few weeks of their arrival in London it was obvious that her most eligible admirer was Lord Wrexham. That he was over sixty, a licentious, dissolute man was of no consequence. Younger men waited on Beatrice, flattered her and avowed to be her most devoted slave, but the majority were seeking a bride with a dowry.

Lord Wrexham could not only afford to marry, he was wealthy enough to be a matrimonial catch. The fact that he had sworn, when his third wife died ten years earlier, never to take another did not depress either Beatrice or her mother.

They played their cards carefully. Lord Wrexham was encouraged to call and Beatrice was paraded before him. He was tantalised and tempted by her beauty, but he soon realised that the price of making her his was the cost of a plain, gold wedding ring.

His Lordship paid and was the first of Beatrice’s triumphs, although by no means the last. Those who were shocked by the marriage and the disparity of age between the bride and the groom, and who knew the unsavoury reputation of the latter, foretold the future with gloom. They were disappointed. Beatrice showed no sign of being disgusted or affronted by her husband’s licentious ways. Gorgeously dressed, wearing fabulous jewels that even the Queen would have been proud to own, she became the toast of London.

For so young a girl her self-assurance was phenomenal. Her beautiful face was a mask to hide her real feelings, whatever they might be. There were those who said that Wrexham, entranced by his young bride and converted by her innocent purity, had turned over a new leaf, there were others who averred that he had merely drawn her into the vortex of sin and vice in which he himself wallowed.

It was hard to know the truth. One thing only was certain – Lady Wrexham enjoyed her position as the wife of a nobleman.

Four years later Lord Wrexham suffered a stroke. He retired to his country seat, but his wife did not accompany him. She remained in London and there were those who said that she was preparing to make a much more important marriage as soon as she became a widow.

But Lord Wrexham did not die, he remained in the country half paralysed, his senses somewhat impaired, enjoying, it was true, many comforts but not the companionship of his wife.

Beatrice Wrexham began to be talked of in a hushed voice. It was not only scandal that surrounded her, it was the aroma of intrigue. Still the most beautiful and the most extravagantly dressed woman in London, she appeared to demand more of life than the social gaiety of Ball, Masque and Rout. Her ambition was insatiable. Once she had craved money, jewels and a title, now she wanted much more – that insidious, delectable, but dangerous possession of all – power.

It was noticeable that among the beauties at court, Beatrice was unique in that she chose her lovers not for their physical attributes, but because they were of political consequence.

The ladder Beatrice had chosen to climb was by no means an easy one, but beneath her soft yielding femininity lay a backbone of steel. Slowly, step-by-step, she climbed until with the triumphant ecstasy of one who reaches the summit of a mountain, she captured the attention of the Marquis of Severn. Earl Marshal and Hereditary Marshal of England, the Marquis was also the King’s chief adviser.

He was a clever, ruthless and extremely able man, and George II with his heart and his interests firmly fixed in his native Hanover, was content to leave State affairs in Severn’s capable hands. The Marquis’s influence was everywhere, his position unequalled.

Beatrice became friendly, too friendly some people said, with the aide de camp. Having learned from him who Severn’s enemies were, she made it her business to discover certain information about them and then conveyed it to the Marquis with her compliments.

The Marquis’s life had been singularly barren of women. Married when he was quite young to a simple, but dull, young woman of noble birth, his family consisted of two sons and three daughters. The Marchioness was an admirable housekeeper and an excellent mother.

The family place in Hertfordshire was kept up with the kind of pomp and splendour that most people averred surpassed any royal palace and easily eclipsed the drab formality of the Court at St. James’s.

But the Marchioness seldom came to London, while pressure of State affairs made it difficult for the Marquis to visit his country seat save at irregular intervals. Strangely enough, there was little evidence of any feminine influence at Severn House in Berkeley Square, for the Marquis was happiest when immersed in the machinations of statecraft and had a contempt for the frivolous, empty headed chatter of fashionable society.

He liked the company of men and he enjoyed intrigue as other men might enjoy a game of faro. He was singularly astute and he was well aware that Beatrice was stalking him as an animal stalks its prey. He watched her with amusement and when finally he took her in his arms, she was uncertain whether he had succumbed to her beauty or had decided that she was too useful for him to lose.

It was enough in some ways to know that she could hold him, the most powerful and most feared man in England, but at times it had its disadvantages.

The Marquis was no voluptuary as Lord Wrexham had been, to be beguiled with exotic delights and to be enticed into the whirlpool of passion. If Beatrice worked hard to get him, she worked much harder to keep him. He was insatiable in his desire for knowledge of other people. His agents and informers were spread like a spider’s web across the length and breadth of England, but now his tentacles were reaching out towards Scotland.

Beatrice had been taken by surprise when the Marquis had sent for her and told her that he wished her to visit Skaig Castle. She had planned various amusements for the month of August, among them a visit to Italy. But the Marquis had swept her plans aside without even listening to them.

“Arkrae is important,” he said. “I have reason to believe that the Jacobites are trying to gain access to him. If he should decide to support the Pretender, the consequences might be serious.”

“What do you know of him?” Beatrice asked.

“He is young, handsome and wealthy. That at least should make your journey worthwhile, my dear,” he said, a faint smile twisting his hard lips.

Beatrice turned her shoulder to him petulantly. She had been about to leave for a Ball when he had demanded her presence. She was dressed in a gown of shimmering silver brocade trimmed with lace and velvet ribbons.

There was a fabulous necklace of sapphires and diamonds round her neck, and the same stones glittered in her ears and on her wrists. Her beauty was almost breathtaking as she stood there, her big eyes raised to his. But the Marquis seemed hardly to see her.

“Yes, you should be able to manage Arkrae,” he said reflectively.

Beatrice pouted a little.

“And if he is pliable, what do you want of him?”

“His assurance of absolute loyalty to the throne, his enmity towards the Pretender and all those who support him.”