3
MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS
I wondered just how many tiny tea shops there were in Inverness. The High Street is lined on both sides with small cafes and tourist shops, as far as the eye can see. Once Queen Victoria had made the Highlands safe for travelers by giving her Royal approval of the place, tourists had flocked north in ever-increasing numbers. The Scots, unaccustomed to receiving anything from the South but armed invasions and political interference, had risen to the challenge magnificently.
You couldn’t walk more than a few feet on the main street of any Highland town without encountering a shop selling shortbread, Edinburgh rock, handkerchiefs embroidered with thistles, toy bagpipes, clan badges of cast aluminum, letter-openers shaped like claymores, coin purses shaped like sporrans (some with an anatomically correct “Scotchman” attached underneath), and an eye-jangling assortment of spurious clan tartans, adorning every conceivable object made of fabric, from caps, neckties, and serviettes down to a particularly horrid yellow “Buchanan” sett used to make men’s nylon Y-front underpants.
Looking over an assortment of tea towels stenciled with a wildly inaccurate depiction of the Loch Ness monster singing “Auld Lang Syne,” I thought Victoria had a lot to answer for.
Brianna was wandering slowly down the narrow aisle of the shop, head tilted back as she stared in amazement at the assortment of merchandise hanging from the rafters.
“Do you think those are real?” she said, pointing upward at a set of mounted stag’s antlers, poking their tines inquisitively through an absolute forest of bagpipe drones.
“The antlers? Oh, yes. I don’t imagine plastics technology’s got quite that good, yet,” I replied. “Besides, look at the price. Anything over one hundred pounds is very likely real.”
Brianna’s eyes widened, and she lowered her head.
“Jeez. I think I’ll get Jane a skirt-length of tartan instead.”
“Good-quality wool tartan won’t cost a lot less,” I said dryly, “but it will be a lot easier to get home on the plane. Let’s go across to the Kiltmaker store, then; they’ll have the best quality.”
It had begun to rain—of course—and we tucked our paper-wrapped parcels underneath the raincoats I had prudently insisted we wear. Brianna snorted with sudden amusement.
“You get so used to calling these things ‘macs,’ you forget what they’re really called. I’m not surprised it was a Scot that invented them,” she added, looking up at the water sheeting down from the edge of the canopy overhead. “Does it rain all the time here?”
“Pretty much,” I said, peering up and down through the downpour for oncoming traffic. “Though I’ve always supposed Mr. Macintosh was rather a lily-livered sort; most Scots I’ve known were relatively impervious to rain.” I bit my lip suddenly, but Brianna hadn’t noticed the slip, minor as it was; she was eyeing the ankle-deep freshet running down the gutter.
“Tell you what, Mama, maybe we’d better go up to the crossing. We aren’t going to make it jaywalking here.”
Nodding assent, I followed her up the street, heart pounding with adrenaline under the clammy cover of my mac. When are you going to get it over with? my mind demanded. You can’t keep watching your words and swallowing half the things you start to say. Why not just tell her?
Not yet, I thought to myself. I’m not a coward—or if I am, it doesn’t matter. But it isn’t quite time yet. I wanted her to see Scotland first. Not this lot—as we passed a shop offering a display of tartan baby booties—but the countryside. And Culloden. Most of all, I want to be able to tell her the end of the story. And for that, I need Roger Wakefield.
As though my thought had summoned it into being, the bright orange top of a battered Morris caught my eye in the parking lot to the left, glowing like a traffic beacon in the foggy wet.
Brianna had seen it too—there couldn’t be many cars in Inverness of that specific color and disreputability—and pointed at it, saying, “Look, Mama, isn’t that Roger Wakefield’s car?”
“Yes, I think so,” I said. There was a cafe on the right, from which the scent of fresh scones, stale toast, and coffee drifted to mingle with the fresh, rainy air. I grabbed Brianna’s arm and pulled her into the cafe.
“I think I’m hungry after all,” I explained. “Let’s have some cocoa and biscuits.”
Still child enough to be tempted by chocolate, and young enough to be willing to eat at any time, Bree offered no argument, but sat down at once and picked up the tea-stained sheet of green paper that served as the daily menu.
I didn’t particularly want cocoa, but I did want a moment or two to think. There was a large sign on the concrete wall of the parking lot across the street, reading PARKING FOR SCOTRAIL ONLY, followed by various lowercase threats as to what would happen to the vehicles of people who parked there without being train riders. Unless Roger knew something about the forces of law and order in Inverness that I didn’t know, chances were that he had taken a train. Granted that he could have gone anywhere, either Edinburgh or London seemed most likely. He was taking this research project seriously, dear lad.
We had come up on the train from Edinburgh ourselves. I tried to remember what the schedule was like, with no particular success.
“I wonder if Roger will be back on the evening train?” Bree said, echoing my thoughts with an uncanniness that made me choke on my cocoa. The fact that she wondered about Roger’s reappearance made me wonder just how much notice she had taken of young Mr. Wakefield.
A fair amount, apparently.
“I was thinking,” she said casually, “maybe we should get something for Roger Wakefield while we’re out—like a thank-you for that project he’s doing for you?”
“Good idea,” I said, amused. “What do you think he’d like?”
She frowned into her cocoa as though looking for inspiration. “I don’t know. Something nice; it looks like that project could be a lot of work.” She glanced up at me suddenly, brows raised.
“Why did you ask him?” she said. “If you wanted to trace people from the eighteenth century, there’re companies that do that. Genealogies and like that, I mean. Daddy always used Scot-Search, if he had to figure out a genealogy and didn’t have time to do it himself.”
“Yes, I know,” I said, and took a deep breath. We were on shaky ground here. “This project—it was something special to…to your father. He would have wanted Roger Wakefield to do it.”
“Oh.” She was silent for a while, watching the rain spatter and pearl on the cafe window.
“Do you miss Daddy?” she asked suddenly, nose buried in her cup, lashes lowered to avoid looking at me.
“Yes,” I said. I ran a forefinger up the edge of my own untouched cup, wiping off a drip of spilled cocoa. “We didn’t always get on, you know that, but…yes. We respected each other; that counts for a lot. And we liked each other, in spite of everything. Yes, I do miss him.”
She nodded, wordless, and put her hand over mine with a little squeeze. I curled my fingers around hers, long and warm, and we sat linked for a little while, sipping cocoa in silence.
“You know,” I said at last, pushing back my chair with a squeak of metal on linoleum, “I’d forgotten something. I need to post a letter to the hospital. I’d meant to do it on the way into town, but I forgot. If I hurry, I think I can just catch the outgoing post. Why don’t you go to the Kiltmaker’s—it’s just down the street, on the other side—and I’ll join you there after I’ve been to the post office?”
Bree looked surprised, but nodded readily enough.
“Oh. Okay. Isn’t the post office a long way, though? You’ll get soaked.”
“That’s all right. I’ll take a cab.” I left a pound note on the table to pay for the meal, and shrugged back into my raincoat.
In most cities, the usual response of taxicabs to rain is to disappear, as though they were soluble. In Inverness, though, such behavior would render the species rapidly extinct. I’d walked less than a block before finding two squatty black cabs lurking outside a hotel, and I slid into the warm, tobacco-scented interior with a cozy feeling of familiarity. Besides the greater leg room and comfort, British cabs smelled different than American ones; one of those tiny things I had never realized I’d missed during the last twenty years.
“Number sixty-four? Tha’s the auld manse, aye?” In spite of the efficiency of the cab’s heater, the driver was muffled to the ears in a scarf and thick jacket, with a flat cap guarding the top of his head from errant drafts. Modern Scots had gone a bit soft, I reflected; a long way from the days when sturdy Highlanders had slept in the heather in nothing but shirt and plaid. On the other hand, I wasn’t all that eager to go sleep in the heather in a wet plaid, either. I nodded to the driver, and we set off in a splash.
I felt a bit subversive, sneaking round to interview Roger’s housekeeper while he was out, and fooling Bree into the bargain. On the other hand, it would be difficult to explain to either of them just what I was doing. I hadn’t yet determined exactly how or when I would tell them what I had to say, but I knew it wasn’t time yet.
My fingers probed the inner pocket of my mac, reassured by the scrunch of the envelope from Scot-Search. While I hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to Frank’s work, I did know about the firm, which maintained a staff of half a dozen professional researchers specializing in Scottish genealogy; not the sort of place that gave you a family tree showing your relationship to Robert the Bruce and had done with it.
They’d done their usual thorough, discreet job on Roger Wakefield. I knew who his parents and grandparents had been, back some seven or eight generations. What I didn’t know was what he might be made of. Time would tell me that.
I paid off the cab and splashed up the flooded path to the steps of the old minister’s house. It was dry on the porch, and I had a chance to shake off the worst of the wet before the door was opened to my ring.
Fiona beamed in welcome; she had the sort of round, cheerful face whose natural expression was a smile. She was attired in jeans and a frilly apron, and the scent of lemon polish and fresh baking wafted from its folds like incense.
“Why, Mrs. Randall!” she exclaimed. “Can I be helpin’ ye at all, then?”
“I think perhaps you might, Fiona,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you about your grandmother.”