Whitney, My Love (Westmoreland Saga 2)

Clayton strode from the room and resisted an unprecedented impulse to embrace the excellent physician.

When he left, Hugh Whitticomb walked over to the decanter of brandy and removed a handkerchief to mop his brow. The dowager duchess appeared at his side and touched his arm. “How was it?” she asked softly.

“She gave me a scare, Alicia. She lost some blood, but she’s going to be fine. Even before the bleeding started, I’d no intention of leaving here until tomorrow, at the earliest. You know that.”

“Of course I do,” she said with a teary smile, then she gave into the impulse that Clayton had ignored and hugged him tightly. “Thank you, Hugh,” she whispered. “I was terrified.” She looked around at the others. “I can scarcely hold my eyes open. I think I’ll retire.”

“I believe I’ll do the same,” Lady Gilbert said.

Lord Gilbert politely arose and when he bent to press a kiss on her cheek, he saw tears of relief glistening in her eyes. “There, there, my dear,” he said with a little laugh, “I told you there wasn’t any reason for alarm. Didn’t I?”

“Yes, Edward,” Lady Anne said, giving him an abashed smile. “You were right all along.”

Lord Gilbert leaned around her and peered at Stephen, who looked fifteen years younger than he had a few minutes before. “Just look over there at Stephen. He wasn’t alarmed. You ladies worry too much. Childbirth is the most natural thing in the world, isn’t it, Stephen?”

“Yes, of course it is,” Stephen averred, smiling at Lord and Lady Gilbert. He stood up and walked over to the decanters of liquor. “I think I’ll have something to drink before I go up to bed—in honor of the occasion.”

“That’s a capital idea,” Edward Gilbert seconded and promptly joined Stephen at the side table. He watched his wife drift from the room, then he looked around for the physician and realized he had already gone up to bed, leaving only Stephen and himself in the drawing room.

“What will you have?” Stephen said, gesturing to the array of crystal decanters and glasses.

“I believe I’ll have the brandy,” Edward replied.

“Excellent choice,” Stephen replied, handing him a suitable glass along with the entire decanter of brandy. For himself, Stephen chose a glass and a decanter of whiskey.

In silence the two men settled onto the sofa, then they filled their individual glasses with their choices of liquor. With his glass of whiskey in his hand, Stephen leaned back, stretched out his legs and crossed them at the ankles. Lord Gilbert settled back into the cushions with his brandy glass and adopted the same pose, then he looked at Stephen in silent, masculine communication.

Together they lifted their glasses and took a deep drink, then they waited for the liquor to begin to burn away the remnants of their terror.

Stephen drank a great deal more than Lord Gilbert did, but then Stephen had more to forget than just his fear for Whitney and the baby. Emily had sent him a note a few hours before.

She’d written to tell him that she had married Glengarmon.

42

* * *

Three days after Noel Westmoreland’s arrival into the world, Whitney was sitting up in bed, propped up on a pile of pillows, wondering why neither her husband nor her mother-in-law had been in to see her since early that morning.

Clayton arrived as the clock began to chime the hour of three. “Where have you been all day?” she asked after she returned his kiss.

“I had to make a trip to Claymore,” Clayton replied, sitting near her left hip. “How are you feeling?”

“Happy and well.”

“Excellent. How is my son and heir?”

“Hungry and very outspoken about it,” Whitney laughed. “Clarissa insisted on taking him to the nursery so I could get some rest, but I’m not sleepy.”

“Good, because I’ve brought you a gift from Claymore.”

“You went all the way to Claymore just to get me a gift?” she said. “I would have rather had you here, keeping me company.”

“I am intensely flattered to hear that,” he said with a grin. “However, I actually had no choice, and it ended up taking my mother and me several hours longer than we expected to find what we were looking for.”

Whitney was about to ask for further explanation when his mother appeared in the doorway followed by the butler who was carrying a heavy object concealed by a tasseled red velvet cloth.

“I am to blame for his absence,” the dowager duchess replied with an impenitent smile. “I couldn’t recall exactly where I put this for safe-keeping, and so Clayton had to search for it.” She looked at the butler and gestured for him to place the object on the bed, on Whitney’s right side.

“What is it?” Whitney asked, looking from one to the other of them.

“It is the loveliest of all the traditions in the family, and it is always presented to each successive Duchess of Claymore during her lying-in after the birth of the heir.” As she spoke, she bent and carefully lifted the red velvet away, to reveal a splendid wooden chest with gold hasps and pearl inlays. It looked as if it were hundreds of years old.

Whitney reached for the lid, her eyes alight with curiosity. “It looks like some sort of treasure chest?”

“It is, but with one difference. After you explore the sort of treasure it contains, you must add a similar one of your own, and then you must place a likeness of yourself inside it. You may keep the chest with you while you lie abed, and after that it will be put away until the next Duchess of Claymore lies abed with a new heir.”

Her mother-in-law was being unusually oblique and mysterious, Whitney realized, but she was more concerned that she might not be able to do her part in keeping the hallowed tradition alive. “Treasures? A likeness of myself?” she said worriedly. “When we came for the holidays, I didn’t expect any of this to happen. I never knew about any sort of tradition.”

“Of course you did not,” the duchess reassured her, giving Whitney’s cheek a fond pat. “However, I made certain months ago that Clayton knew, and he has brought a likeness of you that you may put within the chest.”

“But how am I to add a treasure similar to those inside?”

“Open the chest and see its treasures,” the duchess instructed. “Clayton and I will leave you to explore them.”

Completely baffled and thoroughly intrigued, Whitney lifted the golden latch and with both hands she opened the heavy lid. A thrill of delight shot through her and she raised glowing eyes to her smiling mother-in-law. “Letters!” she exclaimed. “Letters and miniature portraits! Oh, look, here’s an ivory fan—and here’s a ribbon. They must have been terribly special for some reason.”

She was so excited that she scarcely noticed that her husband and mother-in-law were leaving the room, closing the door behind them.

> With infinite care, Whitney removed each item from the chest and arranged them on the bed beside her. There were eight letters, most of them yellowed and some in danger of crumbling with age, which explained why the chest was only allowed to be opened for a few days before it had to be put away for another two decades.

One of the letters had been written on parchment and rolled into a thick scroll. Thinking it could be the oldest, Whitney gently unrolled it and saw that she was correct.

It was written on the sixth day of January, 1499, in the elaborate, scholarly hand of the first Duchess of Claymore.

“I am Jennifer Merrick Westmoreland, Duchess of Claymore, wife of Royce Westmoreland and mother of William, born to us on the third day of January. I send you my loving greetings . . .”

Mesmerized, Whitney read the tale of the first duke and duchess of Claymore, set down in wondrous detail by Jennifer Merrick Westmoreland. She wrote of jousts and tournaments and battles fought by her victorious husband, who was called “The Black Wolf,” but instead of concentrating on the sorts of details that would interest a man, she set out to explain the truth of her life to the women who would someday succeed her as the duchesses of Claymore.

She wrote of her outrage when The Black Wolf abducted her from her family’s castle in Scotland and took her to England. When she described her clever efforts to escape his clutches, she made Whitney laugh out loud. She described his ire when he was forced to marry her by royal decree, and Whitney experienced the same indignation and fear that Jennifer Westmoreland would have felt. She wrote of the tournament he fought where she championed another knight against him, and Whitney sighed with shared guilt.

But it was Jennifer Westmoreland’s love for her husband that shined so brightly at the end of the letter that Whitney’s eyes blurred with tears.

She ended her letter with an explanation that she was putting a likeness of herself in the chest with her scroll so that her future daughters-in-law might know her face. “When I told my lord husband of my need for a small likeness and my plan for this chest to pass down through the generations, he commissioned an artist and presented me with this miniature. It is most flattering,” she confided modestly. “My eyes are not so large, nor my features nearly so fine, but my husband swears it is a perfect likeness. It was also his thought that my name should be engraved upon the back of the frame so that if my hopes for this chest come about, then you will be able to find my face among the many likenesses of all the duchesses of Claymore contained within the chest. I pray that each of your husbands will do as mine has done. I only wish that I could know your faces.”