She made a rueful face and said in a low voice, so as not to disturb Danny, “I was born in Dumfries, but I can admit to no longing to return there. Do you know what I remember about my home? Rain flavored by cinders, falling down into the wet streets. Drawn curtains and neighbors who never ceased their gossip. Oh, the Nith is beautiful with its stone bridges, but I confess I would not wish to go back again.”
Yet that was just where Finnan meant to send her, with her tail between her legs.
He shrugged. “Dumfries—that is the lowlands.”
She raised to him a blue gaze tinged with mirth. “Whereas, only the highlands are worthy of admiration.”
“The highlands are the backbone of Scotland.” That backbone might have been broken at Culloden—in fact Finnan knew it had. But, like Danny with his one arm, the sons of this land would fight on.
He propped himself against the wall at the head of the bed. “Tell me of your life in Dumfries, Mistress MacWherter.” He welcomed any details he might use against her. “Geordie said little enough of your situation there.”
She appeared to think about it, and turned her gaze away from him. “It seems I have spent my whole life looking after other people.”
Not what he expected her to say. His eyebrows jerked upward.
“My father was a curious man, a scholar and very well educated. He worked at the University of Glasgow for a time, but there were incidents, and they asked him to leave. He took his books and his opinions and his scandalous ideas and moved to Dumfries, where he accepted children of the wealthy class, to educate. There he met my mother. She was a chambermaid at his first residence. Very pretty.”
She would have been, Finnan reflected.
“He ruined her,” Jeannie said, speaking as distantly as if of someone else, “and then decided it would be good, equitable and just, to marry her and raise her to his level. My father was always an equitable man. He claimed to see no differences between the classes and, I think, more than half believed it.”
“You were that child?”
She smiled bleakly, and her fingers, soft and gentle, caressed Danny’s hand. “The only child they had. My father decided to educate me as I grew. My mother—” She paused abruptly.
Finnan asked, with unwilling sympathy, “Is she dead?”
“Probably, by now. I do not know.” She shot him another look, this one defiant. “Why do we speak of this?”
“Because you said you have always looked after others.” He nodded at the bed.
“I looked after my mother until she left. She went mad. Father claimed reason could cure her. It could not.”
That sent a jolt of surprise through Finnan. “I see.”
“No, Laird MacAllister, I doubt you do. My father drove her mad with his expectations.”
“How is that, then?”
“She could not be what he wanted. You would have had to know him, if you were to understand. He could be very kind, very idealistic. He could also be so closed into the workings of his own mind he became unreasonable. Things to him were very simple and yet immensely complicated.”
“You say your mother left him?”
“Left him, and me. I was ten at the time. I took over running the household, and took care of my father and every stray soul he brought home.”
“There were many of those—stray souls?”
“More than you can imagine: thieves, prostitutes, swindlers, and some good people also, gone astray. He met them on the streets or in the ale houses. He began drinking after my mother left and never looked back.”
And so was that all Geordie had been to her, another stray? Why marry him, then? Why bother to break his heart? Anger burned in Finnan anew, despite the way her words pulled at his sympathies. Yet she sat there stroking Danny’s hand and said, “I understand how this lad feels, wanting his mother.”
Aye, and no wonder she did not want to go back to Dumfries. And no wonder, with such an upbringing, she had grown into a deceptive and ruthless creature. Anything to survive.
Finnan understood that edict. But he would never harm those he loved.
“Is that how your father died?” he asked. “The drink?”
“My father,” she said with an edge in her voice, “could drink vast amounts of whisky with very little apparent effect. He just became…more so. More intelligent, more dictatorial, more absolute. It was his arrogance that killed him. Oh, I am sure the drink contributed. His health and his body were both ruined well before the night he died.”
