Page 69 of It Happened in the Highlands
And then he stopped and began to back away, and Jo glimpsed the small, lady’s muff pistol she’d drawn from the drawer of the desk.
The barrel of the gun swiveled toward Jo, and Mrs. Barton moved a step closer. She wasn’t going to miss.
Their strategy, devised at Knockburn Hall when Charles haltingly asked Wynne and Jo to bring him here, had degenerated into imminent disaster. Jo had been willing to provoke Mrs. Barton and Graham, and prod them for answers, but right now it looked as if she would die in the effort.
Jo didn’t know how he reached her, but suddenly Wynne was standing between them.
“This has gone far enough, Mrs. Barton,” he said coolly. “You’ll hand me that pistol immediately.”
“Do you think for a moment that I’ll let her take everything? My family? My home? My position? Get out of my way.”
A thousand thoughts and fears raced through Jo, for she knew this woman was capable of pulling the trigger. She’d come to the Highlands to get answers, to find her origins. And now she knew her mother’s story. She’d discovered her father. But what about Wynne? He was the one true love of her life. And she could lose him now.
Fear gripped her heart with iron claws. He was her past, her future, her present. Her life and her dreams. He was the happiness that she thought she had lost forever. He was the air that sustained her.
Sixteen years ago she lost Wynne. Here in the Highlands she found him again. And now he was standing between her and a loaded weapon.
“You can only shoot one of us,” he said to Mrs. Barton. “It won’t be her, I promise you.”
Graham took a step toward the older woman.
“Stop,” she barked. “If I had two bullets, one of them would be for you. Now get out of the way, Captain.”
She couldn’t let him do this. Jo tried to step around Wynne, but he held her back.
“They’ll hang you for this as sure as we’re standing here. Do you think her brother, the Lord Justice, would allow you to live if you kill either of us today?”
“Do you think I care? Do you think I want to live after this?”
Jo edged around Wynne enough to see Mrs. Barton waving the pistol.
“Then you may as well shoot me,” he said. “I’ve already taken one bullet for her. I’m ready to take another.”
“No!” Jo shouted, backing out of Wynne’s reach and stepping to the side.
As the pistol turned, she saw the woman’s eyes focus on her, and her intent was deadly.
“No, Mother,” Charles Barton said as his hand closed over the pistol, pushing the muzzle toward the floor. “You’ll not . . . not be killing . . . my daughter.”
Chapter 23
Though she hadn’t expected to, Jo saw Mrs. Barton every day after the incident in the library.
When Charles intervened, the older woman had immediately sunk into a chair, shocked and staring at him. She’d been defeated, stripped of whatever power she imagined she had over her son, over Jo, even over Graham. When she failed to move or respond to anyone, servants carried her up to her chambers and put her to bed.
Before they left for the Abbey, Wynne had them send for Dr. McKendry.
Struck down by apoplexy from the shock she’d brought on herself, Mrs. Barton was attended by physicians, first by Dermot and then from the village and from Aberdeen. After two days, their diagnosis was hardly optimistic. The old woman was conscious, for she could blink her responses to simple questions even though she could not speak. But she’d been left with no ability to move or perform the simplest of tasks. Leana Barton would lie in her bedchamber indefinitely, stripped of the dignity of living as she had lived, sentenced to imprisonment within her own mind.
After what had occurred at Tilmory Castle, Jo was relieved when her father expressed his wish to remain at the Abbey. Charles had given up Tilmory Castle as his home long ago.
Rooms for him had been arranged near her in the north wing. With the assistance of an attendant, she was certain she could manage his ongoing recovery.
Charles faltered in his efforts to speak, a continuing problem that frustrated him. But when the words failed him, he picked up his pen and wrote out his wishes, for his comprehension was improving daily. His memory contained great lapses, but Dermot told him not to despair. Others before him had recovered fully, and they would keep at it.
Three days later, Graham asked for an opportunity to explain his side of things, so Jo and Wynne took her father by carriage back to Tilmory Castle.
“There could be no punishment worse than what your mother has been sentenced,” Graham said to Charles. They were sitting in the library again, and a steady rain was beating against the windows.
