Megan Denby

by A Thistle in the Mist

  “Och, lad, ye can always ask.” I heard the smile in the captain’s voice.

  Rabbie noisily cleared his throat again and I could hear the strain in his voice. “Miss Meara has been through a lot, Captain. She’s lost her family. Her bairn was taken from her and she doesna ken if her husband lives.”

  I pressed my knuckles to my lips and strained to hear Rabbie’s low voice. I needed to hear what he had to say. He told the captain everything. He told him about Deirdre and Sloan, Mother’s death, Da’s disappearance, Hannah’s suicide and finally the kidnapping of my bairn. He left out nothing and I cried silently as the beloved faces of my family came back to me.

  The captain said nothing once Rabbie had finished and the poor lad cleared his throat again and continued, “And so I’d like to ask if ye would deliver a message to our home, to my grandfather if it wouldna be too much trouble.”

  I rubbed away my tears with my perfumed sleeve as the captain responded, “Aye, lad, that’s the least I can do for ye. If only I’d kent the truth when this Sloan brung ye to me. He told me as ye were his weans and that ye’d robbed him blind and he just wanted to be rid of ye rather than be bothered wi’ the authorities. Lord, but he’s a bag o’ shite! Aye, laddie, I’ll see that yer letter is delivered personally tae yer grandfather.”

  “Thank ye, Captain.”

  “Now there’s somethin’ as ye might do for me. I believe it’ll be easier to convince John to take the two of ye together if I say yer brother and sister. Ye both share the same colourin’ and that way I can appeal to his sense of decency, dinna want to split up family and all that. It shouldna be too hard to convince him. It’ll keep you two from being separated. And, lad, I wish I could just return ye back to Scotland, the both of ye. But it’s a business I run and I have my own debts. I’m sorry lad.”

  I closed my eyes for a long moment then turned from the door at that. I finished the row of buttons and surveyed myself in the smoky mirror that hung over the captain’s bureau. I didn’t much resemble the bright-eyed young lass of a year ago. My eyes were an earthy green, older somehow and my cheeks were hollow. New bruising coloured my jaw, courtesy of O’Flynn and my lip was swollen and shredded by my own teeth. Blood had congealed in a triangular nick at the hollow of my throat and my body still jerked from the shock. I squared my shoulders and stared hard at my reflection.

  Rabbie and I would be able to stay together and somehow we would make our way back to the Isle of Skye.

  I shoved my feet into the soft slippers then smoothed the skirts of my outrageous attire. I opened the door and as they looked up, I felt my lips wobble a bit before I smiled. Rabbie, my loyal comrade, and a gentleman taught by Mary, immediately stood.

  His troubled eyes searched mine for a moment then with relief, he smiled back.

  EIGHTEEN

  June 1809

  An Angel Comes

  “Och, yer a tough old bugger, I’ll gi’ ye that much. Yer takin’ a lot longer to die than we would ha’ thought. Probably easier if I just hold the pillow over yer sorry head.”

  Lizzie ladled thin oatmeal into a bowl. Black mould traversed the interior of the bowl, thriving on the remnants of leftover gruel that hid in the cracks. The old woman dragged her chair to Robert’s bed and set the bowl on the nightstand. Then she shuffled back to the shelf and retrieved the bottle of laudanum. Groaning loudly, she lowered her crooked body into the chair, the humped protrusion preventing her from settling back. Her head jutted forward and she fixed Robert with a stare from beneath sparse brows. “I’m no really tryin’ to kill ye o’ course. One killlin’ in my lifetime is enough for me, ye ken!”

  Finding this inexplicably humorous, she slapped her thigh, her chortles jabbing pinpricks of pain through Robert’s temples. Disgusted, Robert looked away. Her laughter gradually died and she eyed her prisoner through narrowed lids.

  Then with fluttering hands she fussed with her matted hair and delicately smoothed at the wrinkles of her skirt. Robert was not fooled by Lizzie’s act of frailty. He had been at the mercy of those ‘feeble’ hands more times than he could remember. Those shrivelled claws clamped his nostrils and forced laudanum-spiked oatmeal down his throat every day. The consumption, along with the long term effects of the laudanum had weakened Robert to the point where it was all he could do to hold his head up. His arms were covered with sores and he suffered from shaking fits often. He knew his days were numbered. Death waited at the foot of the bed and he welcomed it. Anything to release him from the pathetic being he had become. He was resigned to the fact that he would never see his Meara and Hannah again, but he was certain they wouldn’t miss him. He had not been a father to them after Jessie died, when they had needed him most. He prayed that Duncan was taking care of his girls.

  Endless months had rendered Robert MacDonald not only helpless but virtually unrecognisable. The once luxuriant copper hair was woven with wiry strands of grey, hugging his head in greasy clumps and straggling from his chin. His face, the ruddy complexion long gone, had wasted to a tight mask.

  His only response to Lizzie’s continual prattle was a weary blink. For months he had endured her one-sided gibberish as she purged with intimate details of her past; details he cared nothing about. Every so often she left the hovel for the day to meet Sloan who supplied her with more food and laudanum. Upon her return, she teased Robert with tidbits of information about his family that she learned from Sloan. She spoke of his daughters with a sickening intimacy that enraged him but which he hungrily clung to.

  In his rare lucid moments, Robert had been able to piece together most of the events that led up to the murder of his wife and the ensuing effects on himself and his family.

  Lizzie was Deirdre and Sloan’s mother. As a young woman she had fallen in love and had a bizarre tryst with his father-in-law, Rory McQueen. Consequently, she felt there was a chance that Rory was Deirdre’s father. Sloan, however, was the son of her abusive husband, Donnie McBain. According to Lizzie’s ramblings she had killed Donnie as he was about to do something bad to Deirdre, then she had told Deirdre and Sloan that their real father was Rory McQueen.

  The old woman had tracked Rory and Searlaid McQueen over the years and had bided her time. In her twisted, hate-filled mind, she felt Rory was in debt to her because she had kept his secret for him. Rory was a very rich man and Searlaid had brought a substantial dowry with her as well and so Lizzie waited for the ideal time to collect. When Rory and Searlaid had succumbed to the fever she had seized the opportunity to get even. There was no one alive to refute her claims, so Lizzie instructed her adult children that the time had come for them to regain their rightful heritage.

  Deirdre and Sloan, in the meantime, had followed close in their parent’s footsteps. Deirdre secured a position as house-servant for a wealthy laird in Inverness. Sloan, with Donnie’s tainted blood coursing through his veins, shared his father’s cruel nature and his love of the drink.

  Deirdre’s meager income barely covered the rent of their rat-infested hovel. Sloan was usually without a job but when he did manage to find work he either drank away the pittance he earned or spent it on the services of a trollop, slaking his unnatural lust the only way he could.

  Deirdre resembled her mother, which consequently offered no clue as to her parentage. Her homely face and lacklustre personality did not increase her chances of finding a husband. As time passed and she neared her fortieth year, she knew she would never marry, never have a child, a perfect son or daughter – the very thing she wanted most.

  One evening as she made her way home from the laird’s home, she was attacked, dragged down a narrow alley. After she was raped, her assailant had beaten and robbed her and left her for dead.

  She had stumbled home, close to death, the rapist’s seed planted in her womb.

  The brutal attack transformed Deirdre from a withdrawn spinster, who had secretly dreamed of a husband and children, into a bitter, hate-filled woman with darting eyes and twitching hands. Robert thought it
was in this way Deirdre most resembled her mother.

  With eviction a constant threat hanging over their heads, Deirdre returned to work immediately, hatred swelling in her soul like a festering pustule.

  Then Deirdre realised she carried a child and she buried the hatred and instead waited with anticipation for the bairn she would hold in her arms. She told her mother she intended to leave once the child was born, leave this life, her disturbed mother and alcoholic brother, and start a new, wonderful life. Deirdre’s burning desire to better herself increased with each passing day.

  Lizzie had scoffed at her daughter’s foolish dreams. Where would she go? How would she survive with no money? But Deirdre had plans. She would secure a position as a governess with a lovely family and take her son or daughter with her.

  The bairn came early, under the cover of night, slipped easily into his grandmother’s twisted hands. Beautiful chestnut curls adorned the wee lad’s head and a thick fringe of dark lashes lay on the smooth, transparent cheeks. Five tiny fingers graced each dimpled hand. He was perfect.

  Almost.

  Deirdre had survived the violent conception of her child and now lived only to hold him in her arms and love him. But it was not to be. Her son’s tiny body curved in on itself, his spine exposed at the base, fluid leaking from a large sac low on his back. The angelic head drooped forward on a puny neck, far too weak to support it.

  Just before dawn on the third day, Deirdre’s son took his last breath. Her dreams died with her child as the sun filled the morning with light. Lizzie wrapped her grandson in a blanket and for the second time made the trek out to the moor. Sloan, doing perhaps the only decent thing in his life, accompanied his mother and dug the small hole. Lizzie buried the child, marking his fresh grave with a hastily constructed, wooden cross.

  Though Deirdre’s heart continued to beat in her chest, she wished she was dead. With her back turned to her mother and brother, she lay in bed, her dreams dashed, her life unfairly destroyed.

  When their landlord pounded on their door, Deirdre woodenly rose from her bed and returned to work. The loss of her child consumed her, filled her with rage. The hatred she had managed to bury came to a head and ruptured within. A crazed desperation lurked in her dark eyes.

  Lizzie saw it and understood that her daughter hovered on the edge of something bad.

  Fearing for her daughter and hoping to ease her pain, she put her long-ago-conceived plan into motion. She entrusted Rory’s ring to Deirdre and soon thereafter, her daughter and son made the two day trek to Duntulm Castle. With the ring as proof, claiming to be Jessie’s siblings had been easy. However, they had been surprised how easy it had been to infiltrate the trusting family.

  Their plan of living in comfort and enjoying their father’s riches spiralled out of control when Deirdre, in a fit of frenzied jealousy, shoved Jessie down the stairs.

  Thus the downfall of the MacDonald clan had begun.

  ******

  Robert blinked slowly, his fiery stare boring steadily through Lizzie. Loathing for himself, this woman and her children was the only emotion he had been capable of for months. He sickened himself. What kind of man was he? He had allowed himself to be a pawn in their devious game when he had known in his heart something wasn’t right. However, he had ignored Meara’s warnings, wanting only to please his wife and now she was dead because of his weakness.

  “Och, dinna look at me like that Mister MacDonald.” She swiped the laudanum from the table and held it inches from his nose. “A few extra drops o’ this and ye’ll be history.” She snapped her fingers and grinned obscenely at him.

  “Do it then.” Robert’s voice was barely audible, rasping from between his parched lips. “Please.” He could not understand why Lizzie was prolonging the inevitable. Why didn’t she just end it?

  “My my my, what nice manners ye ha’,” Lizzie sang, smiling indulgently at him, as though speaking to a child. “But nay that wouldna do now, would it? It canna look suspicious ye ken. Ye must pass on natural-like. I dinna want to be thrown into the gaols or hanged for yer murder.”

  Her lids drooped and her eyes glittered as she peered sideways at Robert. “I want to be around to hold my new grandson, ye ken,” she purred.

  With exaggerated nonchalance, Lizzie unscrewed the cap of the laudanum and watched as a few drops dimpled the surface of the runny gruel. Her eyes darted to Robert then back down as she shifted the bowl from the table to her lap. Slowly she stirred, deceptively intent upon her task.

  Gradually her words crept through the tangled web that was Robert’s mind. Grandson. Deirdre’d had a child? The thought stirred for a few seconds before it whirled away. He didn’t care anyway. Robert didn’t care if Deirdre had borne ten children.

  The spoon scraped the bottom of the bowl, round and round, Lizzie’s eyes now eagerly trained on Robert’s blurred eyes. “Aye, wee Heath – Heath Robert – is what Sloan said. He just told me yesterday. It’s a braw name, don’t ye think?” Her voice was like velvet, her bright eyes skimming Robert for a reaction. She abandoned the stirring and snatched a few strands of her own hair. With expertise, borne of obsessive practice, she twirled the greasy tendril round and round her index finger. A tremor passed through her eyelid, followed by a jerk of her head that belied her barely-contained excitement.

  Robert blinked and his gaze slid back to Lizzie’s too-bright eyes. Triumph pulled the meshwork of grooves that crisscrossed the face into a hungry smile.

  “Aye, Robert, and I must say that daughter of yers is verra generous. She bore a healthy lad then just gave him to Deirdre straight away. I guess mebbe when she learnt her laddie wasna comin’ back from the war, she decided a bairn was too much trouble. Yep, she up and disappeared, but I must say it was generous of her to leave the wean behind.” The creak of the rocking chair grew faster. The lamplight enhanced the elation that leapt from Lizzie’s eyes. “Och, Deirdre couldna be happier! All she ever wanted was a wean of her own, ye ken.” Lizzie leered at Robert and raised her eyebrows expectantly. Her finger continued to twirl the lock of dank hair around and around her finger.

  Robert felt a tightening somewhere deep inside and the bottom plummeted from his stomach as he gaped at Lizzie. He yanked feebly at his bindings and attempted to sit upright. He tried to speak and his heavy lips worked to form a word.

  “Du... Duncan?”

  Lizzie’s grin swallowed her wizened face. “Aye, her big braw mannie went and got hisself killed. No match for the French, ye ken. So after the bairn came, Meara packed up and left without a word to anyone. Ye canna really blame the lass, ye ken. What was she to do with her whole family gone and her left to care for a bairn on her own? Aye, verra sad, I say.” She shook her head, clucking her tongue in mock sympathy. “Sloan has searched high and low but he hasna been able to find her. He feels horrible about it.”

  She set the bowl on the table, beside the flickering lamp and creaked out of her chair. Bending close, her wiry hair scuffed, like saw-grass, across Robert’s face. The sour odour of her unwashed body rose from the gaping neckline as she wrenched the filthy ends of the bindings tight. Robert’s hands flailed about seeking escape but to no avail.

  “There ye go now, laddie, comfortable are ye?” she asked sarcastically. She stood by the bed, surveyed his pathetic struggle as a nasty smile played upon her lips.

  “Och, it’s a shame yer other daughter, Anna?” Her brow wrinkled and she scratched at her head as she tried to remember the other daughter’s name. Her eyes brightened. “No, no, it’s Hannah! That’s her name. Aye, it’s too bad Hannah shares her father’s weakness.”

  At the mention of his youngest daughter, Robert stopped struggling, afraid to move. His lungs emptied and his haunted eyes bore fearfully into Lizzie’s.

  Lizzie nodded her head sadly. “Aye, I would ha’ had another grandchild to hold if that girl weren’t so much like you.” Her sympathetic performance ended as she ground out her next words, her lips curled with disdain. “But she was
like you, just like you, weren’t she, Robert? Weak, pitiful and pathetic.”

  Robert could not take his eyes from Lizzie, bewilderment freezing his ravaged face in a mask of terror. “What... wh... what ha’ they... done to Hannah?” The effort to speak cost him and his body vibrated as he forced himself upright.

  “Wh... wh... wh... what’s the matter, Robert? Havin’ a wee bit o’ trouble spittin’ out yer words?” Lizzie’s giggle was almost girlish. She smoothed Robert’s rumpled quilt and patted his leg.

  He watched as her sagging breasts rose and fell. His skin crawled beneath her touch and he jerked away. Panic clawed at his innards. What had they done to his daughters?

  “Dinna fash, lad. It canna be changed the now. What’s done is done. Ye see yer wee Hannah was expectin’ a bairn as well.” Panting heavily now, as though she’d run a distance, Lizzie leaned in. Excitement set her dark eyes ablaze and pumped her mouth full of saliva. She swallowed and her tongue darted out to retrieve the spittle that leaked into the corners. “No one did anything to her. She did it to herself. She went and threw herself into the ocean, killed herself and the wean.” The appetite momentarily sated, the thirst for revenge briefly quenched, she released a long slow breath then serenely folded her hands and surveyed her victim.

  Robert’s eyes brimmed with tears. Lord no... no... no. He slumped back.

  She clucked her tongue, shook her head, incapable of sympathy. “Aye, such a waste, such a waste. I wouldna minded another grandchild, perhaps a bonnie wee lassie.”

  Blood roared through Robert’s head as he clenched the wooden rails of the bed, his fingers blanching white. Tears slid down his emaciated face.

  A cunning glitter once again sprang into Lizzie’s eyes. She’d forgotten one tiny detail. How could she have possibly forgotten this? She smiled to herself. She meant to see the destruction of Robert MacDonald through to completion. Not that she really had good reason to want to see him dead, but it was a game and she was tiring of it. The game had to end some time. Perhaps she wouldn’t need the laudanum. It was taking a lot longer than she’d thought and it was cruel to let the lad linger so. Maybe the shock would finish him off.