Her initial offer, to pretend they’d just met, no longer suited him.
Wynne admired the woman she’d become. He was drawn to her as sure as the bee to the flower. And if her reaction in the garden was any proof, she wasn’t immune to him either.
Their kiss had started a fire in him that had been nearly impossible to contain. If it weren’t for the slam of a door and the threat of someone coming upon them, they could have gone too far. And that was wrong because they still hadn’t put the past behind them. Taking Jo in a garden or in his bed without offering her a future was not what he’d intended to do.
Thankfully, reason and respectability reared their stern and forbidding heads, and she couldn’t get away from him fast enough. In spite of all she’d said, he sensed that the past was still wedged firmly between them. The botched retraction of his offer of marriage. Her family. His own family. His duel with her brother Hugh.
Jo had changed and so, Wynne realized, had he. Until she arrived, he thought he knew himself and what his future would be. Now he wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted. Over the past few days, an ache deep in his gut had begun to gnaw at him, and it was getting worse. As if he were a young bull in springtime, stirrings of desire afflicted him, and he would not stop in his pursuit. But to what end?
He needed to win her, but he would not hurt her again.
Cuffe and Jo were waiting for him by the fish ponds. As Wynne approached, his focus shifted to the two. His son stood so confidently as he spoke to her. He was meeting Jo’s gaze directly, something he still rarely did when speaking with Wynne.
For her part, Jo glowed with the sparkling water behind her. Enthusiasm lit her face at whatever the lad was conveying.
The image was perfect. A vision of harmony. The two were more at ease with each other than either was with Wynne.
His relationship with Cuffe had improved tenfold in this past week alone, but the boy’s decision to speak didn’t make him feel like a trusted father. The lad continued to complain and question his authority and negotiate what Wynne said needed to be done. He had no doubt his son still wanted to get back to Jamaica, the place he considered his real home.
The conversation stopped as they noticed his approach. Undeterred, Wynne asked them what they found interesting to talk about on such a fine morning.
“Cuffe was telling me that between late last night and early this morning he finished copying out Ohenewaa’s stories into a volume of his own,” Jo replied as they set off toward Knockburn Hall.
One more reminder of his failure as a parent. He’d missed so many rungs in the ladder of fatherhood. Last night, rather than a hastily said “good night” from the doorway, he could have gone into Cuffe’s room and talked to him. He could have already heard from his son’s lips about this accomplishment.
Too late now, he thought, still managing some belated praise as they walked along.
Cuffe slowed down when they reached the second fish pond. A lad from the kitchens was net fishing in the shallows. Drawing in the lines, the young man closed the net around his catch and hauled in a dozen good-sized trout that were destined for the Abbey’s dinner table. Wynne realized this was one of the boys his son had fought with, and he was relieved to see there was no open hostility between them.
“Now that I’ve finished reading them all,” Cuffe said, addressing only Jo as they continued on, “I can’t decide which of the tales are my favorites.”
“The story of Lightning and Thunder was one I particularly liked when I was growing up,” she replied.
From a marshy area at the top end of the pond, the sound of a thousand frogs filled the air, causing Cuffe to glance in that direction.
“‘Getting Banished to Sky,’” he said as they continued to walk. “The stories have a lot of banishing in them.”
“They are tales people told each other to explain nature, while keeping the young ones’ attention.”
“Almost all them teach a lesson,” he noted. “And they’re learned painfully.”
“True in life as well, isn’t it?” she asked. “But some of the tales are uplifting and quite funny.”
Wynne decided to venture into the conversation.
“What about your grandmother, Cuffe?” he asked. “She must have had stories that she told you when you were growing up.”
The old shrug was back, but Wynne wasn’t going to be put off so easily.
“What were those stories like?”
Cuffe picked up a stick, hitting it on the ground as they walked, and Wynne and Jo exchanged a glance over the boy’s head.
“How did they compare?” Jo asked. “Were any of the lessons in Ohenewaa’s stories similar to your Nanny’s?”
“She always said her tales were about wisdom,” he answered with a smile. “‘You smarter now?’ she’d say after a story. ‘Ol’ Hige is out tonight. Better to stay in.’”
“What is Ol’ Hige?” Wynne asked.
Cuffe ignored him and dragged his stick along the ground.
“Ol’ Hige is a witch,” Jo told Wynne. “She sheds her skin and flies by night. Sometimes she turns into an owl.”
“How did you know?” Cuffe asked, looking up with admiration.
She shrugged and smiled. “Go ahead, tell your father what Ol’ Hige does.”
Too excited about the story to remember he was trying not to be nice to Wynne, Cuffe rattled off his explanation. “She sucks out people’s breath while they’re sleeping. She especially likes the babies.”
“How do you protect yourself?” Wynne asked. “Can she be killed?”
Cuffe looked first at Jo, but when she shrugged, he decided to continue.
“She sheds her skin when she flies. And that’s when you can beat her.” He talked as if this was information everyone knew. “If you find her skin, you put salt and pepper on it. Then she can’t put it back on because it will burn her. That’s how she dies.”
Wynne smiled and looked at Jo. “You’ve heard this before?”
“A version of it. I’ve heard Ol’ Hige stories under different names. In Ohenewaa’s tales, she was called the Sukuyan, and she traveled not as an owl but as a ball of light, looking for blood to suck.”
“But your sister didn’t put it in the book,” Cuffe said, holding out a hand to help Jo around a low wet place in the path.
“I think Phoebe was too frightened to write it down on paper.” Jo smiled. “Even as an adult, she spends most of her time living in her imagination. I wouldn’t be surprised if she still lies abed at night looking at the window and expecting Ol’ Hige to swoop in and steal her breath or her blood.”
They reached the log that traversed the brook and Cuffe ran across before quickly coming back to hold Jo’s hand as she crossed.
As they started along the path again, Wynne tried to keep his son talking. “Maybe you should add the stories your Nanny told you to this collection. Or perhaps you could make a separate book.”
Jo’s nod told him he’d made a good suggestion, so he was surprised when his son’s eyes grew sad.
“I didn’t hear them enough to keep them in my memory,” he said in a low voice before turning to Jo. “You were able to listen to Ohenewaa for years and years.”
“No, I wasn’t, though I wish I could have. We lost Ohenewaa when my sister Phoebe—the one who set the tales down on paper—was younger than you are now.”
“How did she remember them?”
“She put down what she could and embellished them as she wrote. The ones you read are retellings of retellings.”
“So they’re not exactly as you heard them?”
Jo shook her head. “No, but we were all so relieved that she did it, because now a woman we loved will stay in our minds and hearts forever. And the next generation of Pennington children will know her too.”
Cuffe seemed satisfied with the answer, but he said nothing of Wynne’s suggestion about writing down Nanny’s stories.
They walked in silence for a while until the stone w
alls of Knockburn Hall came into sight. As they were passing the orchard, Cuffe spoke up.
“How did you lose her?”
Jo glanced over the lad’s head at Wynne before she answered. “Ohenewaa died of old age.”
“In Scotland?”
She nodded. “Yes, she’s buried in a cemetery at our home in the Borders.”
Cuffe stopped, facing her. “Why? Didn’t she want to go back to her own home?”
When Jo hesitated, Wynne knew she was beset with her memories of the old woman. He’d heard so many stories of her. In every way that mattered, Ohenewaa had been a member of the Pennington family.
“She chose the place she wished to call home,” Jo said finally. “Ohenewaa was a free woman since before I was born. She came from western Africa originally, suffered the brutality of slavers in the West Indies, and came to live with us when she was free. She could have gone anywhere she wished, and she guarded that freedom fiercely. But she chose to remain with us. It was her choice to live the rest of her life where my mother and her children were, to be part of our lives. We loved her and she loved us.”
Cuffe shrugged and drew a pattern in the grass with his stick before meeting Jo’s gaze again.
“But what about her other family, the people she left behind in Africa or in the islands? Don’t you think they missed her? Didn’t they need her too?”
The ten-year-old didn’t wait for an answer, but turned and strode away from them.
Wynne saw the concern in Jo’s face as Cuffe trudged toward the massive building.
“He is still struggling,” he whispered, touching her hand.
“I know.” She smiled sadly and linked her arm with his. “But he has a point. My brothers and sisters and I, my parents, my grandmother before she died—everyone who knew Ohenewaa—felt so fortunate to have her in our lives, but we were only thinking of ourselves.”
There was nothing Wynne could say to console Jo. He had no answers, no wisdom to share. He felt the same helplessness that he had been experiencing for months in the face of his son’s unhappiness and anger. There were no other choices for Cuffe but the life he was offering him. Jamaica was not a safe place for him. But to say the words or to argue them wasn’t enough.
The walls of the house glistened in the morning sun. It occurred to Wynne that he could have moved here with Cuffe before now. He could have had windows installed and purchased the furniture, and that would have been enough. But he’d held off, making excuses, telling himself he was waiting for the addition to be completed. All lies. They weren’t living here because neither of them was ready. How could he move his son from the Abbey—as flawed as the living arrangements were—to a shell of a house that had no heart?
As he considered this, he saw his son walk directly to the door, push it open, and disappear inside.
At one time his life was all about keeping those he loved under control, protected, safe. It had driven his decisions about life with Jo. About who would raise his son. But what did that get him? He felt no fuller than the empty house looming ahead.
While they were climbing the last short rise to the door, Cuffe reappeared. Without giving them so much as a glance, he walked around the side of the house to where an overgrown greensward dropped away to a pond. There, he plunked himself down, hugged his knees to his chest, and looked across the water into the murky depths of the Highland forest.
* * *
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 J
o 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.
It Happened in the Highlands Page 11