Page 25 of It Happened in the Highlands
If the captain had struck him with a rod, it wouldn’t have been as painful as this waiting, but Cuffe had no choice except to weather it until his silence ran its course.
“Go back to your room. Tomorrow I’ll talk to you about punishment.”
Cuffe was surprised at the note of exhaustion in the captain’s voice, but he was relieved at being dismissed. At the door, as he tried to hurry past the man, a large hand came down on his shoulder. For a moment he thought, this was it. The beating. He stood and braced himself.
“I need you to promise,” the captain said. “I want your word that you’ll stay in your room until I send for you.”
Myword,Cuffe thought. He was trusting in his honor despite what he’d done.
“I’ll stay there, Captain,” he said, meaning it.
Chapter 9
Night’s restless hours crawled ever so slowly over rugged ground toward the dawn, and when the earliest rays of the sun broke across the furrowed fields, Jo was already dressed. She had to get out and walk.
As she hurried past Wynne and Cuffe’s rooms, the inner arguments that kept her pacing for much of the night once again ignited in her.
She’d lied to the father, but shortly afterward convinced the son to reveal the truth. What worried her was how Wynne perceived her interference. She was willing to argue her case if he gave her the chance. But beyond that, she was apprehensive about Cuffe and wondered what had transpired between the two. She’d been trying for hours to convince herself that none of this should matter, that she was here simply to learn more about Mr. Barton and his sketches. She was not staying for Wynne or his son.
Buttoning her spencer jacket and wrapping her shawl around her shoulders, she descended the stairs thinking of the attack last night. Charles Barton had an enemy. She’d overheard Cuffe mention the name Abram. She wondered now if the man had acted for reasons of his own or if he was only a rung of a ladder held by others.
Two attendants sitting by the door to the ward looked half-asleep but stood and doffed their caps to her as she went by. Jo understood there was no point in asking to see Barton. After last night, a visit to the ward would need the approval of the doctor.
Going out through the gardens, Jo followed a path toward the rising sun. Stables and a carriage house lay beyond groves of tall chestnut, and as she passed cottages of farm laborers, the smoke of wood fires rose above the thatched roofs. She exchanged greetings with a woman carrying a bucket of milk who stopped to watch her go by. Open fields lay beyond, and groups of workers were trudging toward their day’s toil.
A few minutes later, Jo paused at the top of a small brae and looked south across the rolling landscape toward the River Don. Mist was rising from lower-lying pastures and along two brooks that snaked across the countryside toward the river. Though she couldn’t see the village, she saw numerous cottages and sheds, as well as the fields used as golfing links by the Squire and his brother, the vicar.
Something about this place touched her with a feeling of familiarity, though she knew she’d never been here before. The Highlands was so different from the Borders, where Baronsford was located, and totally different from Hertfordshire, where she’d spent a great deal of time growing up. But the bracing air, the smell of the gorse, the way the light dispersed in the mist all affected her.
Turning her steps toward the hills rising to the north, she walked along a path that followed one of the brooks and came upon a series of fish ponds formed by small dams. As she stood by a clump of willows, her attention was drawn to an ancient tower house nestled against a forest of spruce. She wondered who lived there so close to the old Abbey.
Her shoes and skirts were wet and stained with mud, but Jo strode on as questions about her mother again blotted out any other thought. Last night, she’d again paged through the portfolio of sketches Dr. McKendry sent her. Her birth mother. A woman she’d never seen, but who’d died bringing Jo into the world. For all the love she’d been blessed with in her life from her adoptive mother and father, holding the drawings in her hand still elicited a deep ache in her chest.
As the night wore on, Jo focused on details in the backgrounds of the drawings. A distinctive shape of a hill, a crumbling stone wall, a mill. Each of them seemed to represent a particular place, perhaps a specific memory in the ailing man’s mind.
She wondered how Graham and Mrs. Barton would react if she paid a visit to Tilmory Castle, and whether she’d find those places in the drawings there. If their response to seeing her yesterday was any indication, she wouldn’t be received at all.
A flock of geese suddenly took wing in a meadow beyond the brook, their pure white bellies a stark contrast against the brown feathers of their backs. The cause of their flight soon became apparent, and Jo immediately wished she too could escape as she recognized the man walking toward her.
Wynne saw her, paused, and then waved. She watched him as he strode across, his long coat open. He was hatless, and buff-colored buckskin breeches hugged muscled thighs above his high boots. All thoughts of escaping fled. For a prolonged moment, time flew backwards. Jo’s skin tingled and she fought the urge to lift the hem of her skirts and run to meet him.
Instead, Jo pulled her shawl tightly around her as she stopped and waited for him to approach.
“You’re an early riser,” he said, after they exchanged greetings.
Not as early as he was, she thought, noting the hint of tiredness in his eyes. His hair bore evidence of fingers raking through it. Despite his obvious weariness, however, she thought he looked magnificent.
“Too many days trapped inside that carriage. I had to take the opportunity this beautiful countryside offered,” she explained, looking in the direction he’d come. “I thought I’d walk that way if you think the people living at that house wouldn’t mind me trespassing on their land.”
Wynne looked back at the tower house. “I’ll walk with you and make certain they don’t.”
Jo’s intention was to go in the opposite direction of where he was traveling. There was no avoiding it. Wynne gave her no chance to object.
Regardless of what reason dictated, her heart directed her actions. They walked for a while in silence, and her recollections about their past continued. The way he walked with one hand tucked behind his back, his strides adjusting to match the length of hers, his distance courteous and yet close enough that she would occasionally feel the brush of his coat. She filled her lungs with dawn air, and made herself think of the present rather than the past.
“I must apologize for last night,” she said finally. “I should have told you right away I’d seen your son in the stairwell.” Of everything on her mind, this was the least troubling of her thoughts.
“You have no need to apologize, especially to me,” Wynne replied. “I’m the one who should express my remorse over every wrong I’ve done you.”
