The Pretender

May your life be the grandest adventure

The Skye Boat Song

Speed bonnie boat
like a bird on the wing.
Onward! the sailors cry,
Carry the lad that’s born to be king
O’er the sea to Skye.

Loud the winds howl, loud the waves roar,
Thunderclaps rend the air.
Baffled our foes stand on the shore,
Follow they will not dare.

Though the waves leap, soft shall ye sleep,
Ocean’s a royal bed.
Rocked in the deep, Flora will keep
Watch by your weary head.

Many a lad fought on that day,
Well the claymore did wield.
When the night came, silently lay
Dead in Culloden’s field.

Burned are our homes, exile and death
Scatter the loyal men.
Yet, ’ere the sword, cool in the sheath
Charlie will come again.

Speed, bonnie boat,
like a bird on the wing.
Onward! the sailors cry,
Carry the lad that’s born to be king
O’er the sea to Skye.

Early one summer’s day in 1746 . . .

Dawn broke softly on a peaceful Northumbrian morning in May, wrapped in the gossamer warmth of a rose-colored sunrise and stirred by the gently warbling lyric of birdsong, until—

“Preposterous! That’s what this is. Utterly preposterous!”

Alaric Henry Sinclair Fortunatus Drayton, fourth Duke of Sudeleigh, shook his head and grumbled over a breakfast plate heaped with his favorite buttered eggs and mutton ham. He stabbed a chunk of melon with his fork, and from the expression on his face as he chewed it—the bitter twist of his mouth—one would have thought the fruit had gone foul.

At the opposite end of the table sat her grace, Duchess Margaret, a striking woman of regal demeanor, straight nose, and high forehead, with thick chestnut hair only slightly sprinkled with silver. This particular morning
she wore it
à la tête de mouton
beneath the frilled tippets of her lacy lingerie cap, haloed by the sunlight pouring in through the window behind her as she calmly poured a steaming splash of pekoe into her husband’s tea bowl. In contrast to the duke’s thundering moments before, the duchess presented the very picture of tranquility.

Her husband’s outburst hadn’t given her even the slightest turn, for over these five-and-twenty years past—the whole of their married life together—she had learned to take the duke’s sudden fits of temper in stride. Though at times he was hot-headed, Alaric rarely did any real damage.

“What is it this time, dear?” she finally asked, knowing he was stewing, waiting for her to respond.

“Bah!” he answered immediately. “It is another installment of that ridiculous journal,
The Female Spectator
.” The duke waved a small, printed booklet through the air. With his graying auburn hair and starched collar, he looked quite like the local vicar pontificating at his pulpit. “A waste of the very paper on which it is printed.”

The duchess took a small sip of tea, glancing sidewise at him. She noticed a loose button on the lapel of his morning coat and made a mental note to have it attended to. She quite liked that coat. The color brought out the flecks of green in his eyes. “Wherever did you find this one?”

“I heard of it from Lord Polson, who had it by Lord Gwynne, who first learned of it from Lord Bainesford, who actually came across his wife discussing it at tea!”

“Leticia had it at tea? I always thought her a most sensible woman. . . .”

The duke rallied on. “So I sent for a copy myself from
the bookseller in Newcastle. They tell me it is all the talk at the coffeehouses in London. A disgrace to king and country! I say, just look here on the first page, Margaret. ‘A Letter in Favor of Woman’s Equality to Man.’ Equality! A woman to a man? Have you ever heard such nonsense?”

The duchess, who knew when it was best to keep her own views to herself, simply shook her head and concentrated her attention on the spreading of a thin layer of marmalade over her breakfast toast. “No, dear. I should say I have not.”

“Who on earth would write this foolishness?”

“I really cannot say, dear.”

“
A Lady of Quality
, that is what it says here, but I cannot imagine anyone of our acquaintance doing something so extreme as this. I’m told there is wagering into the thousands as to just who the author of it might be. Everyone from serving maids to duchesses—even the queen’s name has been bandied about, treasonous a notion as that may seem. More than likely the unruly chit is the natural offspring of some Whig bast—”

Any resemblance he’d borne to the vicar ended right there.

“Alaric! The girls . . . kindly curb your tongue.”

The duke swallowed his oath, frowning so deeply that it made his jowls droop over the tight knot of his lace cravat like a pudding. He dropped the pamphlet onto the table in front of him, took up his tea, and swallowed a vigorous gulp of the fragrant brew. He then spent the next several moments glaring sullenly at the square silver buckle on his left shoe.

His silence on the matter, however, didn’t last for long.

“I say if she dares to write such a thing, this self-proclaimed ‘Lady of Quality,’ then she ought to at least have the conviction to attach her name to it. Let everyone in the kingdom know exactly who she is so they can shame her husband or her father or whoever else it is responsible for her into bringing this indecent rebelliousness into line.”

“Yes, dear,” the duchess replied a sigh.

“Discipline, Margaret, that is what it is lacking there.” He shook his finger at his wife’s nose. “I’ve always said there needs to be discipline in every household. You scold me for keeping such a tight rein on our girls, but you could wager your favorite pair of silk stockings that
our
daughters would never be found authoring such twaddling trash.
Our
daughters know the proper order of things, a woman’s place and what not.”

The duke looked from his wife to the display of feminine grace arranged prettily along both sides of the long mahogany table. Five pairs of eyes, demurely cast in varying shades from brown to green, peered back at him.

“Is that not true, girls?”

“Yes, Papa,” came a chorus of singsong voices.

The duke measured out a breath to steady himself. Indeed, he thought as he stared at them all, even to someone without his biased opinion, they were a veritable feast of female perfection. Had there ever been such grace, such unembellished loveliness? A credit to England they were, for there could be no truer examples of polish and good breeding in the land. Completely forgetting the pamphlet that had so provoked him moments
before, the duke actually smiled beneath the fringe of his powdered periwig, contented as a cow as he looked from one daughter to the next down each row, ranging in age from eight to twenty-four.

Caroline, Matilda, Catherine, Isabella, and Elizabeth; they’d named them for some of the finest queens in English history. Each in her own way was as unique, as intelligent, as undeniably refined as royalty—legitimate royalty, that is—even the little one, Caro, who drank her breakfast tea quite as if she were dining at Kensington Palace.

And, oh, how very close they’d come to doing just that.

It had begun nearly two centuries and a quarter before, with an obscure little scrap of a baggage named Eliza FitzJames. Of all the women the eighth King Henry had wedded, bedded, and even beheaded, none had managed to successfully deliver him a surviving male heir—none except the quiet, unassuming Eliza, a distant cousin to the king several generations removed, and one of his longest-lasting mistresses.

It was on a quiet autumn day back in 1521 that Eliza gave birth to an infant son, one who bore both the trademark red-gold hair and the fiery temperament of his legendary sire. She dubbed the child Fortunatus in hopes that he might elude the sickness and calamity that had befallen the king’s other offspring, and indeed the babe grew into a strapping young lad of whom the great king only grew more fond each day.

But history had already been written and Henry was yet wed to the Spanish Catherine of Aragon, leaving him unable to claim the child as his own. So he did the only
thing he could to secure the boy’s future, wedding his sweet Eliza to one of his most devoted courtiers, Sinclair Drayton of Parbroath. In exchange for a fortune and a noble title, Drayton agreed to raise young Fortunatus as his own while turning a blind eye to his wife’s lifelong liaison with his sire.

And on the son who would become Henry’s only male child to survive to adulthood, one never able to inherit his crown, the king bestowed the highest honor he could—the dukedom of Sudeleigh.

So it was that two centuries later, Fortunatus’s great-great-grandson Alaric now sat among his own progeny, puffing up his barreled chest beneath his brocaded waistcoat in a manner quite like that of his regal forefather. Though denied by fate a kingdom now in the hands of a distant Hanoverian cousin, Alaric had made it his life’s duty to continue the lineage of his own near-regal dynasty through his daughters, whom he would see allied with fine husbands of good English stock—earls, marquesses, perhaps even a royal prince.

He looked on them now, poised like delicate blossoms around his breakfast table, at the heart of which sat his duchess, his pride, his meaning. Closest to her, always at her side, sat Caroline—their youngest, his daisy, innocent and bright as a star with her pale blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes constantly seeking the sunlight. Next came Matilda, or Mattie as she preferred, pretty as a pansy, the flower of thoughts, or so Hamlet’s Ophelia had said. She more than the others was the image of her mother with rich brown hair, her eyes flecked with gold and most often turned onto the pages of a book. Catherine, his middle daughter, was the wallflower and ivy, not
because she wasn’t as lovely as the others, not at all. Katie was a vibrant flower with her dark red-orange hair and deep green eyes, but contented most to blossom away from the dazzle of sunlight—quiet, unassuming, a waft of fragrant scent carried gently on the summer’s breeze. Across from her sat his sweet violet, Isabella, with a sweep of dark hair and damson-blue eyes—the romantic, tender, and virtuous. And with her Elizabeth, his eldest, his wild rose—vivid, fragile, lovely beyond compare, delicate yet still barbed.

When he came to the eighth chair at the table, the only vacant one, the duke found himself giving in to a familiar sigh. Much as he loved his daughters, beamed with fatherly pride whenever he looked at them, just like old King Henry two centuries before him—

—Oh, how he longed for a son.

It was the very worst of dilemmas.

Alaric Henry Sinclair Fortunatus Drayton, the wealthiest and most influential duke in all England, was without a direct male heir. Should he kick off this mortal coil by the morrow—perish the thought—his beloved wife and daughters would lose everything they had ever had, the home they’d always known, the comforts to which they were accustomed. Their clothing, even the bedsheets they slept upon, would fall to the present Sudeleigh heir, the son of his father’s youngest brother. In doing so, his wife and daughters would become financially dependent upon a person who at last count had reached an age all of fourteen years.

It was this thought which kept Alaric awake through many a long night, chasing shadows as he paced along dark corridors when he couldn’t sleep. It was this
thought which caused him to dread each approaching new year. The older he grew, the further his hopes for his family’s future flagged. But if he had a son . . . ah, yes, if he had a son.

Alaric stole a glance at his wife as she sat listening to their daughter Catherine chattering about her latest art lesson. Even though the other girls were all eager for their mother’s notice, Margaret gave the child her undivided attention. She’d always had that way about her, he thought as he watched her, that way of listening to someone, making that person believe, truly believe whatever it was they had to say was the most interesting topic of discussion there was. Even something as commonplace as the intricacies of papier-mâché . . . or which particular periwig best complemented his bottle-green waistcoat. It was one of the many things he loved about his duchess.

Alaric had married Margaret Leighton, daughter of the Earl of Fiske, when he was just a young man of one-and-twenty, and she little more than a child of thirteen fresh out of the nursery. It was a match that had been long in agreement between their two families, but as a gentleman of the world, Alaric had been less than pleased at the prospect of taking on a child bride. He’d only just left university. He hadn’t yet visited a brothel or fought in a duel. So Alaric had departed for his gentleman’s tour of the Continent scarcely before the ink had dried on the parish register. He returned some five years later to find himself in possession of a wife who was suddenly a woman grown, and the toast of London as well, a lady who made his breath catch in his throat the moment he first beheld her.

He would never forget that night more than twenty
years before when, having just returned to London from the Continent, he had been to the opera with friends and had spotted her sitting in a nearby box, looking as delicate as a pearl.

“Who is she?” he’d asked aloud to whomever happened to be closest by. “Surely she must be someone’s wife.”

His companions had confirmed. “Yes, she is indeed a wedded woman.”

“To whom?” he’d asked.

“To you, for she is none other than the Duchess of Sudeleigh . . .”

Alaric had scarcely been able to believe that the young miss he’d left five years earlier had blossomed into the elegant beauty who sat so poised, so lovely in that theatre box. He’d wasted no time, no time at all, in assuming his role as her husband and consummating their marriage posthaste.

Not very long afterward, the duke and his lovely duchess had begun filling the Sudeleigh nursery with wailing little bundles of newborns—one after another a daughter. With each successive birth, Alaric had noticed Margaret looking on him with increasing anxiety in her eyes, as if some small part of her actually feared he’d follow in the footsteps of his formidable ancestor Henry and send her to the chopping block.

“ ’Tis a wife’s duty, after all,” she would say, “to deliver her husband a son.”

But Alaric could never fault her for fate’s folly. They had, after all, been given the gift of five beautiful, healthy, and intelligent daughters. And just who, he thought hopefully, who had proclaimed their family yet
complete? At four-and-forty, Margaret was yet of an age to bear another child successfully. He himself had only recently passed his fiftieth year, well capable of siring again . . . and again if need be. True, it had been five years since they had lost their last, and too early to tell what it might have been. But perhaps they might have time yet, even if only to give it one last try.

And
oh,
the sport they’d have of it trying.

The duke was so caught up by these sprightly thoughts he failed to take notice of the hazel-eyed stare of the young woman sitting at the left end of the table from him. It was a stare that a more observant man might have termed
dangerous.