Page 38 of It Happened in the Highlands
Wynne’s air of sadness and defeat was palpable to Jo as she stood with him outside the door of Knockburn Hall. He said nothing, but continued to gaze at his son sitting alone on the knoll.
She understood his feelings. Cuffe made a forlorn little figure, sitting in the dense shadow of the chestnut trees, his head resting on his knees. He’d tossed his tam somewhere and was yanking out clumps of the long grass.
Wynne roused himself and took a deep breath before turning his attention to her.
“We’re here,” he said quietly. “We may as well go in. Would you care to see the inside of the house?”
She shook her head and placed a hand on his arm. “Go to him. Talk to him.”
“Cuffe doesn’t want to talk to me. He already knows I won’t give him what he wants. I can’t send him back.”
He was aging before her eyes, lines of concern creased his brow.
“Go sit with him then,” she suggested, motioning in the child’s direction. “He needs to know that you understand he’s in pain.”
“To what purpose?”
She could hear the naval commander in the utterance of those words. He was frustrated. She knew what worked with some men, instilling obedience in their children, was not Wynne’s way. Her own father, though gruff and short-tempered, was a loving man with very different ideas about what a parent’s role should be.
“Simply to let him talk about the life he left behind. Coax him to tell you in his own words what hurts,” she said. “Perhaps you may learn how to make things better for him and for yourself.”
Gently and without warning, he lifted her chin and placed a chaste kiss on her lips. The look of tenderness in his eyes took her breath away.
As he walked toward his son, Jo remained where she was, hoping they could break down the walls between them.
Wynne reached Cuffe and the two exchanged a few words. From his gestures, it looked as if he was asking for permission to join his son. She felt the world stand still. Finally, she saw the slight shrug, and she let out a sigh of relief as he sat on the grass.
Not wanting to intrude on their privacy, she went into the house.
Like so many tower houses, stone stairs ran along the outside walls, and she went up to a landing and through an arched doorway into a large great hall with a cavernous fireplace at the far end.
A carved stone medallion above the fireplace depicted two unicorns holding a shield that bore the rampant lion of the Stewarts, and Jo found herself staring vacantly at it. No matter how hard she tried to focus on the stonework or the plan of the building, her mind continually returned to the conversation they’d had on their way here and the one that was happening now.
She couldn’t recall a question about her childhood jarring her the way Cuffe’s had done. For all the years that Ohenewaa had been a part of her life, rarely had she imagined the old woman’s life outside of the world they lived in. Hertfordshire and London and Baronsford comprised the entire universe for Jo until she’d grown. It was where they lived, where they belonged. She didn’t remember ever asking Ohenewaa if she had another family, people who waited for her and hoped someday she’d return, as Cuffe put it. After she died, Jo recalled no conversation about where she should be buried, only that her mother wanted Ohenewaa interred with the family. Whether her adoptive parents ever asked the older woman’s wishes, Jo didn’t know.
Jo tried to shake off these thoughts and made her way back to the stairs. The smell of stone and ancient fires filled her senses as she climbed to the next level, and she thought of all the people she’d known who lost their families and their homes through acts of violence. The freed Africans and islanders she’d lived with at Melbury Hall who had seen unspeakable crimes against them. The Scottish women and children, shunned by society, who found sanctuary at the residence she established in the tower house near Baronsford. Even her sister-in-law Grace, who’d witnessed her father’s murder at the hands of assassins, in desperation hid herself in a crate being shipped to an unknown destination. All of them severed irrevocably from their past, with only the slightest chance of surviving the present, facing a world in which the future was dark and bleak.
Upstairs, Jo entered a long corridor, lit by a construction opening in the stone at the far end. Doors led to what she guessed were bedchambers. As she walked in and out of rooms, she thought about her own birth mother. She’d spoken to servants and farmers who were around at the time of her birth. Everyone had a story, even haughty people like Lady Nithsdale, and Jo had etched them into her memory.
None of them added much to what Jo heard from her adoptive mother: the words of an old woman and a few utterances of a dying, wild-eyed girl whose only fears were for her newborn bairn.
All the poor creature ever said was that her name was Jo . . .
Don’t know if she was a faerie child or just cast out on account o’ the child swelling in her . . .
Reckoned she had no man she was a-going to, and no husband left behind. Leastwise, she never mentioned any . . .
Terrified . . . kept that muddy plaid pulled over her like a shroud.
“Those poor people, cast out of their homes in the Highland clearances, had been stripped of everything,” Jo’s mother told her. “And what awaited them at the end of their journey looked to be nothing but more misery, if they didn’t die on the road itself. They were torn from their kin, their land, their homes. And still, they were proud. Jo died with her tiny, tartan-swaddled daughter in one arm while her other hand clutched mine. You were her child.”
Jo wiped away the tears on her face and looked out a small window at the father and son sitting on the knoll below. Her life was a story of a displacement too. Without the woman who took her home and raised her, she too would have surely died in a muddy ditch on a road to nowhere.
But to someone, somewhere, Jo’s birth mother belonged. There had to be people who cared about her, who loved her, who worried fearfully about what had become of her.
Perhaps, she thought, a man still lived who cared for her. A man who—years later, in spite of a badly damaged mind—continued to sketch endlessly the woman he’d lost.
As she watched Wynne and Cuffe sitting together, rays of sunlight spilled over the tower house and lit the grassy area around them. The child’s shoulders were shaking while his father spoke steadily. Then Wynne placed an arm around his son and drew him close.
