Page 4 of It Happened in the Highlands
Passing the fields that Dermot’s aging uncle—known to all as “the Squire”—had designated as his golfing links, he soon reached the house. As he rode by the courtyard formed by two wings extending out from the main section of the building, he saw a number of patients and handlers taking advantage of the sun. The ground floor of a north annex, built by the army as a barracks during the campaigns to subdue the Highlands, now served as the ward for patients they were already treating.
Dismounting by the stables, Wynne turned at the sound of a shout coming from the direction of the kitchen gardens.
“Captain!”
He shielded his eyes as he looked toward the voice. With his bald head shining, Hamish was stomping toward him, hauling a scowling ten-year-old boy along by the collar.
This certainly didn’t bode well, Wynne thought, peering at his son’s face as the two approached. Cuffe was sporting a welt over one eye, a bloodied nose, a swollen lower lip, and a torn shirt beneath his waistcoat and dirt-stained russet jacket.
Another fight. The lad had only been in Scotland for a month, and this was his fourth skirmish. Cuffe was living up to the warning his Jamaican grandmother sent when she’d written that she could no longer keep him.
Wynne knew nothing about raising a child, but he’d enlisted the aid of others to assist him. Cameron, the purser on his ship and now the bookkeeper at the Abbey, was to begin teaching the lad what he’d be learning in school. Hamish, lead man on the farms, was to instruct the boy about the practical side of managing the land, an education invaluable for a future landowner.
As post captain in the Royal Navy, Wynne had commanded a number of vessels and hundreds of men during his career. Lads younger than his son served aboard ship, and they all needed time to adjust to the life. He admired the ten-year-old’s independent spirit, but Cuffe was beginning to worry him.
Wynne handed the reins to a stable hand as the two drew near.
“He’s done it this time, Captain,” the farm manager huffed. “This scoundrel of yers.”
Hamish was known both for his patience and his stoical acceptance of the trials of farming in the Highlands. Whatever Cuffe had done now, it clearly had been enough to push the Highlander beyond his limits.
“What have you done, lad?” Wynne asked.
Thin but strong, with a ramrod-straight back, his son gazed steadily at the ground in front of him, his curly, collar-length brown hair falling partially across his battered face. He never looked Wynne in the eye or spoke to him—acts of rebellion, he supposed—but the boy would eventually come around. He had to.
“I’ll tell ye, Captain,” Hamish snapped, not waiting. “This loon of yers has turned the pigs out in the kitchen gardens.”
Pigs in the garden. That was a first. He doubted the pigs did this damage to his face.
“Explain yourself,” he ordered.
Cuffe’s chin lifted and his deep brown eyes stared off at the mountains. He showed no hint of fear and certainly no suggestion of responding.
“I told the young miscreant to oversee the feeding of the pigs while I got ready for us to go out to the west farms. Next thing I knew, the porkers are running amok, the house is in an uproar, and Cook is rampaging, about as wild as I’ve ever seen her. Threatened to put yer son out for the faeries.”
“How did he get the bruises on his face?”
“A fight, Captain.” Hamish shook his head. “By the time we got the pigs back in their pens, we heard squalling so loud I thought theBean Nighe—the demon washerwoman herself—was carrying off a bairn. Turned out yer lad was giving three of the farm lads a beating.”
Looking at the injuries, Wynne wondered how bad the others must look.
“And two of them bigger than this one,” the Highlander asserted. “Now, I know lads will scuffle from time to time, but we can’t have the hospital governor’s son beating up the very farm workers he’s supposed to be overseeing.”
There was no point in demanding answers. Wynne was well accustomed to the vow of silence Cuffe had obviously taken when it came to communicating with him. Over the past month, Wynne had managed the disciplining of the boy himself, but perhaps the chores he’d been assigning were not tough enough.
“I’ll leave the issue of punishment for this infraction to you, Hamish.”
Cuffe’s face turned a shade darker, but he refused to look at Wynne.
“Take him,” he ordered the Highlander. “My son needs to understand that if he refuses to present a reasonable defense for his actions, there are consequences to be paid.”
The farm manager led Cuffe off, muttering about mucking shite out of the stables. According to Dermot, Hamish believed that tough, physical labor was the best way to teach and discipline, and maintain self-respect.
Walking along the side of the building toward the north annex, Wynne tried to remember what he’d been like at that age. As a second son, he’d endured the dreary routine of tutors at home while his older brother was away at Eton, and those men had never spared the rod in teaching him discipline. With the exception of developing an aversion for corporal punishment, he’d never questioned his life or the decisions that were made by his parents. He’d always accepted that those in authority knew best.
Years later, a duel fought on a grey London morning—and the long weeks of recovery that followed—had served to awaken him. He was twenty-two then and had been fortunate to see another sunrise.
As Wynne entered the north annex, the bookkeeper, Cameron, appeared at the bottom of a stairwell.
