Western Aberdeen

The Scottish Highlands

April 1818

With the mid-morning sun warm on his back, Wynne Melfort nudged his chestnut steed to a canter, following the grassy cart path along the banks of the River Don. He breathed deeply, filling his lungs with the strange, coconut scent of the brilliantly yellow gorse as his gaze was drawn along the sparkling waters to the crystal-blue backdrop of the round-shouldered Grampians to the west.

“Fine day to be out,” he said aloud, expecting no answer from his horse.

When Wynne retired from the Royal Navy two years ago, he and his friend Dermot McKendry, who’d served as surgeon on his ships for almost a decade, had turned their steps toward this idyllic place in the Highlands. The majestic mountains and the mysterious lochs and the stretches of untamed coastline couldn’t have been more different from the wide-open sea, or the lush green islands of the West Indies, or the crowded bustle of London and the West End. No place he’d ever been matched the beauty of the Highlands.

Not a mile along the river, Wynne turned his mount northward and rode up the rising tract through the newly tilled fields and stone-pocked grazing lands. Before long, the grey tower of the former Clova Abbey came into sight. Now known only as “the Abbey,” the vast estate—with its farms and forests, mill, and fish ponds—belonged for centuries to Dermot’s family, but the place had become the property of the Crown during the troubled times of Bonnie Prince Charlie. The McKendrys had a penchant for choosing the noble—and often losing—side of things.

The Abbey had offered the perfect situation for the two men. The good doctor, having inherited the wrecked estate, wanted to rebuild it and start a hospital—a licensed private asylum for those suffering from mental disorders caused by injury or disease. Prior to his years sailing with Wynne, Dermot had worked in an asylum in Edinburgh. Whatever he’d experienced there, it had been enough to drive the man to do this—to try to improve on treatment he found greatly flawed.

For himself, Wynne wanted a place to settle, so he put up his money in return for a portion of the estate lands. Now that his son had joined him here, Wynne’s investment was even more important. Years from now, when he was gone, the tower house he was rebuilding and the land around it would provide a legacy, a home that Andrew Cuffe Melfort could call his own, with obligations to no man.

It was a sound partnership. Dermot served as director of the hospital, handling the medical side of things; Wynne served as governor, managing the business affairs.

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 the Bean 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.

“Dr. McKendry is looking for you, Captain. He’s in his office.”

Telling the former purser that Cuffe would likely be absent from his afternoon lessons, Wynne then ascended the stairs. He walked past his own office—an oasis of order and calm—and entered Dermot’s chaotic workplace. Regardless of the constant nagging of the housekeeper during the weekly cleaning, every surface of the spacious room was covered with papers and folders, and the floor was little better. Textbooks and medical journals were scattered about and piled in corners. Volumes lay open on every available chair and on top of stacks of paper.

Each man had his own method of managing his affairs, and neither interfered with the ways of the other, though Wynne was often sorely tempted by the sight of Dermot’s mess.

Standing at a tall desk by a window, the doctor was inscribing notes in an open ledger. He turned around and tossed the pen on top of the book when he heard Wynne enter.

“You’re back.” He smiled, satisfaction evident on his face. “The most extraordinary circumstances have developed with our new patient.”

“Charles Barton?” Wynne asked. “A change in his condition already?”

“Come and see for yourself.” Dermot came around his desk.

Ten days ago, Charles Barton, fifty-six years of age, arrived at the Abbey emaciated and unresponsive, delivered for permanent care by his aging mother, a local landowner. Her son, Mrs. Barton explained, had arrived home at Tilmory Castle in this condition after sustaining a head injury during an explosion aboard some merchant ship months earlier.

Though the old woman had provided generous financial support to make certain her son would be well cared for in his final days, Dermot believed that Barton’s demise was not imminent.

“I heard an uproar of some kind coming from the direction of the gardens,” the doctor said, as they started down the stairs to the hospital ward.

Wynne nodded. “I understand the pigs had some extra greens in their diet, thanks to Cuffe.”

The men exchanged a look. Nothing more needed to be said. Wynne’s struggles with new parenthood weren’t lost on Dermot. “Well, I’m certain Hamish will have everything back on an even keel in no time.”

“I hope so,” Wynne replied. “I took your aunt’s recommendation and stopped down at the village and spoke to the vicar about providing Cuffe with some religious instruction. It was agreed that an hour a week would—”

“You should have asked Blane McKendry about golfing instruction instead.” Dermot shook his head. “I happen to know that old heathen can teach Cuffe more about niblicks and longnoses than he can about Psalms and Beatitudes.”

Regardless of the weather, the Squire and his brother the vicar met every day to chase their golf balls across the fields.

Wynne and Dermot entered the nearly empty ward. He’d seen many of the patients outside. At the far end of the long and spacious room, two handlers were settling Stevenson, the only unpredictable patient in the hospital. Still in his twenties, the former dockworker from Aberdeen had been diagnosed with “furious mania.” Highly disturbed, he had occasional bouts of violence, and any irritation could upset him. Even now, he was upbraiding the handlers with loud obscenities and clutching his tam protectively to his chest.

Wynne knew it took a special temperament and character to treat lunatics. Dermot would not permit the use of shackles, though they were commonly used elsewhere, and only Stevenson was restrained at night. The doctor believed attempts should be made to cure these men, and short of that, they should at least be allowed to live decently.

Charles Barton, their newest patient, was sitting by a sunny window halfway down the room with a secretary’s desk on his lap. Thin fingers moved a pencil lightly over paper.

“He’s conscious!” Wynne exclaimed.

“More or less,” the doctor said. “He has yet to speak a word.”

The two men crossed the ward to the window, but Barton didn’t look up or acknowledge their presence. The man’s greying curls were bound in a head wrapping, and his pale, sunken cheeks sported a thick beard.

“His mother made no mention of it, but we’ve discovered that Mr. Barton is an accomplished artist,” Dermot told him. “But the fascinating thing is that he likes to draw the same face, the same young woman, over and over.”

The old man’s eyes were fixed on a sheet of paper, his fingers becoming more insistent as he finished with a drawing and reached for a clean sheet.

“I’d like to know the subject of this man’s obsession.” Dermot handed the recently drawn sheet to his friend. “It might help with the patient’s recovery.”

Wynne gazed at the drawing in his hands. He’d seen those dark curls before in a thousand dreams. He’d seen them swept up, and he’d seen them falling gracefully over those slender shoulders. He’d seen those eyes, so precisely angled above the high cheekbones. The delicate nose, the set of the mouth. Those lips.

Recognition struck him like a bolt of lightning. He felt the blood drain from his face. It can’t be, he thought. Alarm and hope battled for dominance.

Wynne picked up another sketch. And then another. He stared at each one in turn. All the same woman. There was no question.

* * *

It was only yesterday, the first time they met.

The flushed faces of dancers in their gowns of gold and blue and green, and their evening suits of black, and uniforms of red and blue. Around him, his fellow officers were joking and pointing out prospective brides and conquests.

And then he saw her.

They’d never been introduced, but he knew her by name. She was unlike so many of the young women being presented at Court for the first time, who fought for every glimmer of attention. Even now, standing by the punch bowl, she had a quiet reserve that hinted at sadness. He wondered if she was affected by stories that were beginning to circulate. He didn’t put any stock in gossip, but the talk of her origins was spreading like flames in a dry August meadow.

Groups of partygoers milled about, and several young women halted beside her.

Wynne knew the moment something was said. The warm blush drained from her pretty face and her back stiffened.

Suddenly, she was off, darting through the crowd with the deftness of a bird in flight, until she disappeared through the doors opening onto the terrace.

What possessed him to go, he’d asked himself so many times. He only knew she was upset, she was alone, and he went after her.

* * *

“I . . .” Wynne began to speak, but the words were too slow to keep up with his drumming heart and his racing mind. “The woman in these drawings is Josephine Pennington.”