Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [366]
“Must have been rather special in bed, at least,” I said flippantly. “Runs in the family, I expect.”
He cast me a mildly shocked look, which dissolved into a sheepish grin.
“Aye, well,” he said. “If he was or no, it didna help him much. The Dowager’s maids spoke up against him, and Simon was outlawed and had to flee to France.”
Forced marriages and outlawry, hm? I refrained from further remark on family resemblances, but privately trusted that Jamie wouldn’t follow in his grandfather’s footsteps with regard to subsequent wives. One had apparently been insufficient for Simon.
“He went to visit King James in Rome and swear his fealty to the Stuarts,” Jamie went on, “and then turned round and went straight to William of Orange, King of England, who was visiting in France. He got James to promise him his title and estates, should a restoration come about, and then—God knows how—got a full pardon from William, and was able to come home to Scotland.”
Now it was my turn for raised eyebrows. Apparently it wasn’t just attractiveness to the opposite sex, then.
Simon had continued his adventures by returning later to France, this time to spy on the Jacobites. Being found out, he was thrown into prison, but escaped, returned to Scotland, masterminded the assembling of the clans under the guise of a hunting-party on the Braes of Mar in 1715—and then managed to get full credit with the English Crown for putting down the resultant Rising.
“Proper old twister, isn’t he?” I said, completely intrigued. “Though I suppose he can’t have been so old then; only in his forties.” Having heard that Lord Lovat was now in his middle seventies, I had been expecting something fairly doddering and decrepit, but was rapidly revising my expectations, in view of these stories.
“My grandsire,” Jamie observed evenly, “has by all reports got a character that would enable him to hide conveniently behind a spiral staircase. Anyway,” he went on, dismissing his grandfather’s character with a wave of his hand, “then he married Margaret Grant, the Grant o’ Grant’s daughter. It was after she died that he married Primrose Campbell. She was maybe eighteen at the time.”
“Was Old Simon enough of a catch for her family to force her into it?” I asked sympathetically.
“By no means, Sassenach.” He paused to brush the hair out of his face, tucking the stray locks back behind his ears. “He kent well enough that she wouldna have him, no matter if he was rich as Croesus—which he wasn’t—so he had her sent a letter, saying her mother was fallen sick in Edinburgh, and giving the house there she was to go to.”
Hastening to Edinburgh, the young and beautiful Miss Campbell had found not her mother, but the old and ingenious Simon Fraser, who had informed her that she was in a notorious house of pleasure, and that her only hope of preserving her good name was to marry him immediately.
“She must have been a right gump, to fall for that one,” I remarked cynically.
“Well, she was verra young,” Jamie said defensively, “and it wasna an idle threat, either; had she refused him, Old Simon would ha’ ruined her reputation without a second thought. In any event, she married him—and regretted it.”
“Hmph.” I was busy doing sums in my head. The encounter with Primrose Campbell had been only a few years ago, he’d said. Then…“Was it the Dowager Lady Lovat or Margaret Grant who was your grandmother?” I asked curiously.
The high cheekbones were chapped by sun and wind; now they flushed a sudden, painful red.
“Neither one,” he said. He didn’t look at me, but kept his gaze fixed straight ahead, in the direction of Beaufort Castle. His lips were pressed tightly together.
“My father was a bastard,” he said at last. He sat straight as a sword in the saddle, and his knuckles were white, fist clenched on the reins. “Acknowledged, but a bastard. By one of the Castle Downie maids.”
“Oh,” I said.