Now that his mother had left the room, the Duke tried to forget all they had been talking about.
Instead he wanted to appreciate the beauty of the flowers beneath him and, beyond the immaculately tended garden, there was the shining sea.
It always pleased the Duke when he returned from the South that he could travel home in his yacht rather than by train.
Then he could sail into the bay below the Castle and walk from the wooden jetty into his own garden.
It was at such times that he told himself how lucky he was.
Yet he knew as soon as he arrived that there would be a certain look in his mother’s eyes and it signalled a repeated question to which he alone held the answer.
‘I cannot do it,’ he would mutter to himself when he walked up to bed after a long argument.
Now, as he always felt upset when they quarrelled, he walked out into the garden and down to the sea.
It was a glorious day with the sun shining through a clear sky.
The waves seemed to be dancing with a light that came from the Heavens.
The Duke stood for a long time gazing dreamily out to sea.
He wished that he was in a ship setting forth on an adventure to foreign lands –
*
When finally he returned to the Castle, it was to find his mother waiting for him.
With her was one of his relations who lived about five miles away. It was Moira, the Countess of Dunkeld.
“I heard you were back, Alpin,” she began, “and I am sure you enjoyed yourself in London.”
“I did, Cousin Moira,” he replied, “and it was very gratifying to be invited so often to Marlborough House.”
“Oh, do tell us what that naughty Prince of Wales is doing now,” his cousin begged.
She and her husband owned a house and a small estate that had been in the hands of the Dunkeld family for almost as long as the Dukes had been at Castle Barenlock.
“Of course,” the Countess carried on, “we were all hoping you would bring back exciting news that you were to be married. But your mother tells me no lovely lady in the Beau Monde has yet touched your heart and you are still determined to remain a bachelor.”
“I will not be forced into marriage, which is a very different thing,” the Duke replied somewhat aggressively.
“Well, I have news for you,” the Countess added. “I have two charming girls coming to stay with me. One is my daughter, Charlotte, who you know and the other is a very rich – very attractive American!”
She said the last words slowly, emphasising them.
The Duke laughed.
“If you are trying to tempt me up the aisle with an American, you are wasting your time. There were quite a number of them in London, all very keen to return home with a title. In fact I believe a few Italians have availed themselves already of such pleasant offers.”
“But you refused even to contemplate them. Oh, dearest Alpin, what can we do with you?”
“The answer to that is quite simple, Cousin Moira, I want to be left alone. When I do find the right person I wish to marry, I will naturally notify you all.”
He stalked out of the room as he finished speaking.
His mother looked towards the Countess and made a helpless gesture with her hands.
“It’s no use, Moira, I have talked and talked again to Alpin, but he is so determined not to marry and, as you well know, it is vital that he does in order to save the Castle and the estate.”
“I am sorry for you,” the Countess murmured. “I think it is infuriating of Alpin not to be more responsible.
“He must surely be well aware that everything is becoming more and more dilapidated. The Clansmen are growing restless at not being able to buy new stock at the sheep markets and the rivers are not looked after as they should be.”
“I hear that the poaching is terrible,” the Dowager Duchess added.
“I am afraid it’s true. Night after night, we are told, poachers move up the river. Neither of us employ enough river watchers to prevent them taking away large hauls of our salmon.”
The Dowager Duchess sighed.
“I have told Alpin about it over and over again, but he still says he will not marry until he actually wants to.”
There was silence before she added quickly,
“What is the American girl like you are bringing here tomorrow?”
“She is very attractive and I think quite intelligent. Her father is enormously rich. I believe that he has struck oil amongst other things and also has made a great deal of money from the new steamships America is now building.”
“While we just sit here and watch the bricks falling off the top of the Castle,” said the Dowager Duchess, “and the land remains uncultivated because we cannot afford the wages of any more men to work on it.”
“You must not be depressed, dearest,” the Countess replied. “I am sure that sooner or later Alpin will see sense and come home with a bride we can all welcome with open arms.”
“He is far more likely to present us with a girl of his own choice who does not have a penny to her name!”
“I will talk to him again tonight, Moira. I know he loves me and does want to make me happy. I feel if this American girl is really so rich, he must understand that he has to sacrifice himself for the good of the Clan.”
“I hope you will be able to make him realise that it all rests in his hands. We cannot do more than offer him peaches on a plate and only hope he will pick one up!”
The Countess glanced at the clock and rose.
“I must return to my home,” she said. “My guests are arriving some time after tea and I will bring them over tomorrow for sure.”
“I think that it would be a good idea,” the Dowager Duchess suggested, “if they stayed here. Why not say you are shorthanded or that the roof of the kitchen has fallen in and therefore you are all coming to stay to the Castle?”
“That’s an excellent idea. Actually it is what I would prefer anyway because two of our bedrooms have to be redecorated and the girls are each bringing their lady’s maid with them.”
She paused before she added,
“Of course they are coming up from London with a chaperone, but she unfortunately is going back tomorrow morning.”
“Well, I will look forward to seeing you all before luncheon, Moira. I am sure that your American girl will be entranced by the Castle and of course by Alpin too.”
The Countess gave a laugh.
“He is so handsome and I have been told there were a dozen girls in London only too willing to rush into his arms if he even raised his little finger!”
The Dowager Duchess sighed.
“How can he be so stupid? There must have been at least one young girl who I would gladly have welcomed here as my daughter-in-law.”
“Of course there were, Eleanor. And as Alpin is so friendly with the Prince of Wales, he has undoubtedly met all the greatest beauties and all the greatest heiresses.”
“As I have pointed out to him often enough, Moira, he is getting older.”
The Countess giggled.
“We are all doing that, but you, dearest Eleanor, were always a beauty and the story of how your husband fell in love with you the first moment he saw you has been handed down to us all.”
The Dowager Duchess smiled.
She had been just sixteen at the time and had come back unexpectedly early from school because an epidemic had been threatening the younger girls and holidays had therefore started earlier than expected.
The Duke of Barenlock was staying for the night with her father and mother. He was a widower of thirty-two, his wife having died having their first child, who had not survived either.
A young schoolgirl came running excitedly into the drawing room so that she could fling her arms around her father and mother.
The Duke took one glance at her and fell in love.
He was obliged to wait until she was a year older and then they were married and were ex
ceedingly happy until the Duke died.
Their only disappointment was they only had one child, but, as he was a son to carry on the Dukedom, it was not such a tragedy as it might have been.
There were a good number of men who would have loved to make the widowed Duchess their wife, but she had been so deeply in love with her husband that she found it impossible to contemplate marriage with anyone else.
It was indeed a very romantic story.
The Countess could not understand why Alpin did not make his mother happy by taking a wife and bringing, as they hoped, both plenty of money and several children into the Castle.
However she kissed the Dowager Duchess goodbye and said,
“I will see you tomorrow before luncheon. If you are sensible you will not talk too much about the American heiress until Alpin sees her. I am certain that he will then find it impossible not to marry her.”
“I only hope you are right, Moira, but you know what Alpin is like. If he has made up his mind, he will not marry an American or any other foreigner for that matter, then nothing I can say or do will change him.”
“Just keep your fingers crossed and believe there is always another time.”
She kissed the Dowager Duchess again and then hurried downstairs where her carriage was waiting outside the front door.
As she drove off, she looked up at the towers of the Castle.
She thought that any girl, especially one from the other side of the Atlantic, would be entranced by anything so stunningly beautiful – so obviously like a fairy story.
*
The Duke was certain that the Countess would be talking about him to his mother and so he therefore decided to walk up the river that ran into the sea just North of the Castle.
He had arranged to go fishing tomorrow morning and he had not gone out after breakfast today as he usually did because he wanted to be with his mother,
He was well aware that he had disappointed her by coming back from London ‘empty-handed’ as it were.
But he had spent all of his time with the beautiful Baroness and had therefore not paid any attention to the debutantes who were invariably paraded in front of him at every party he attended.
The only exception of course was at Marlborough House where all the ladies were married and the men, like himself, were young and unattached and devoted admirers of the many beauties who surrounded the Prince of Wales.
There was, needless to say, not an unmarried girl amongst them and the Duke enjoyed many sophisticated flirtations with entrancing and witty ladies.
‘Why,’ he asked himself as he walked along the bank of the river, ‘should I give up that for some tiresome young girl without a single brain in her head, who would doubtless bore me to death a week after I had placed the ring on her finger?’
The few debutantes he had already met in London he had found definitely unattractive – they giggled at what he had to say and blushed if he paid them a compliment.
He was speaking truthfully when he told his mother that he would be bored stiff with any one of them almost before they had left the Church!
He was determined to explore a great deal more of the world before he finally settled down and produced the much-wanted heir.
In the meantime, as far as he was concerned, the Castle would have to wait to be repaired and the Clansmen must look after themselves.
He did, however, grudge the fact that the poachers were spoiling his own sport on the river – they were having a free hand at night to take away as many salmon as they pleased.
“What we need, Your Grace,” his ghillie had said as soon as he went fishing, “be at least two or three more river watchers, then yon devils’ll not sneak in somehow and take the salmon afore we can stop ’em.”
The Duke knew that he was not exaggerating.
He enjoyed fishing almost as much as he enjoyed shooting and so he resented that his special river, like other rivers on his estate, was being pilfered almost every night.
He had at the moment no wish to go back to the Castle and listen to the Countess lecturing him endlessly on the attractiveness of some American heiress.
So he walked further up the river than he intended – to almost the end of his estate in that part of the County.
It had always been a bitter knowledge to the Dukes of Barenlock that one part of their estate which had once been theirs was now held by their rival Clan, the dreaded MacFallins, who had settled there two centuries ago.
Because the McBaren Clan at the time had not the strength to remove them, they had been there ever since and they had systematically extended their land claims.
The Duke was a big landowner, but the great part of his land lay South of the Castle and extended West almost to the other side of Scotland.
The land belonging to the MacFallins was nothing like as extensive as his.
Yet a bitter rivalry had sprung up over the centuries between the two Clans and like many others in Scotland they hated each other so heartily that when they were not actually fighting, they expressed their mutual animosity in language that in polite Society was unrepeatable.
What annoyed the Duke more than anything else was that this particular river, which was his favourite, ran directly through the MacFallin estate and as usual there was continued rivalry as to who caught the most salmon.
The part of the river belonging to the MacFallins ran for about a mile through moorland and then it widened into a large loch under some high hills.
It was the loch which the Duke would have liked to own, although he owned a great many other lochs to the South and the excellent salmon rivers connected to them.
Yet automatically he was irritated that part of his special river ran through MacFallin territory.
He had often thought that it really was ridiculous for the two Clans to hate each other as they undoubtedly did.
The MacFallins were too prudent to venture except rarely onto land belonging to the McBarens and the same applied to the Duke’s men who seldom encroached on land claimed by the MacFallins.
‘The whole situation is ridiculous,’ the Duke often thought, ‘we should have grown out of this nonsense years ago.’
But unfortunately the mutual hatred was still there.
Whenever the Earl MacFallin, who reigned over the MacFallin Clan met the Duke at the County games or any other official occasion, they only nodded to each other and never spoke a word.
Occasionally the Duke received furious letters from the Earl claiming that his land had been trespassed on or that a McBaren had stolen some of his sheep.
The Duke never responded by answering the letters himself. Instead he ordered one of his staff to do so and he learnt that the Earl was extremely offensive about him.
Now walking along the river bank the Duke wished he had brought his fishing rod with him.
He was certain that if he had done so he would have managed to catch at least one or two fresh young salmon.
Then suddenly he saw just ahead of him that there was someone fishing.
And it was on his bank of the river.
He wondered for a moment who it could be.
Perhaps his mother in his absence in London had given permission to a visitor or a tourist to fish there.
Then he was certain that, as he had been back for two days, she would have told him if there had been any such arrangement.
There was no doubt that the person fishing ahead of him was a trespasser and a poacher!
There were bushes on the side of the river and the river itself curved so that the Duke did not have a clear view of the intruder until he had passed through some trees into the open.
It was then he saw that just ahead of him was a woman.
And she was fishing in his river!
She was definitely a stranger on his land.
So he walked towards her quickly and angrily.
“What on earth are you doing here?” he barked at her sharply while she still had her back to him.
She
gave a little cry and turned round.
He could now see that she was quite young and not unattractive.
“I am – sorry,” she stammered. “Have I come – too far? I was told to stop where the MacFallin land ended, but I did not know – exactly where that was.”
“You are on my ground,” the Duke said sternly, “and you are in fact poaching. So I would be grateful if you would go back up the river for at least a quarter of a mile.”
“Yes, of course, and I am sorry – so very sorry,” the woman muttered.
She started to reel in her line.
Then she gave a sudden cry.
“It’s a salmon! What do you want me to do?”
The Duke had intended to tell her to shake it off as it was his salmon and yet she was fishing extremely well.
Keeping a tight line on the salmon, at the same time dropping the tip of the rod whenever it leapt.
She was so excited at the prospect of a catch, he felt he could not give her an order to shake it off.
The fish was fighting hard for its freedom and the Duke appreciated that this woman knew exactly what she was doing.
She was keeping her fish tightly under control with an expertise he night have shown himself.
She had by now moved a little further down the river and yet she still had complete control of the salmon which was fresh and must have just come into the river from the sea.
Almost without thinking about it the Duke picked up her net which was lying on the ground and followed her down the riverbank.
Finally, after an enthralling battle, the salmon could fight no longer and she began to wind in her line.
The fish made a last desperate effort to escape, but the Duke bent forward and caught it in the net.
“I have done it at last! I have really done it!” the girl exclaimed. “I knew I would catch a salmon if I was lucky, but I would never have landed it if you had not been here to lift it out of the water for me.”
She was speaking so excitedly that the Duke asked,
“Is this the first salmon you have ever caught?”
“My very first salmon!” she replied. “I have caught trout at home on our river, but this is different. It’s the most exciting thing I have ever done.”
The Duke smiled.
He remembered he had felt like that when he had caught his first salmon.
Love and the Clans Page 2