The Ruby Brooch (The Celtic Brooch Trilogy) (42 page)

He let go of her hand. “Aye. It’s a good likeness of Donald.”

Thomas gave the portrait back, and she returned it to her pocket. “I don’t understand any of this.”

Sean leaned forward in his chair. “Father asked Donald and Jamilyn—“

“
Jamilyn?
” Kit’s fingers wagged in the direction of the portraits in the hallway. “A painting of her is hanging on the wall.” She looked back at Sean. “I was told she was your twin sister.” Her legs bounced faster. The sofa had to be shaking. If she didn’t get up and pace she’d shoot off like a rocket in about ten seconds.

“Aye. She was born first.”

“You mean… you mean to tell me, I’ve been looking at my mother’s portrait all my life?” A hot flash soaked her in sweat. She fanned herself with her hand.

“Are ye ill, child?” Sean said.

She fanned faster.

The servant appeared with a tea service and cookies. “Sukey fixed tea. She bubbling up like hot cakes. She say she have a baby gone care for. I say phhh, how you know. She say fore spring she gone have a baby to rock. Say Mister Thomas he be a great-granddaddy. Suckey just smile real big like the preacher gone preach a extra service.” He left the room chuckling to himself. “Yes suh, we gone have a baby.”

Thomas’s face glowed.

“How do they know about me?”

Sean clamped his teeth over his lower lip to keep from laughing. “Sukey’s not only our cook but the local midwife. Everybody in three counties will ken there’ll be a wean come spring.”

For a private person, that prospect made Kit even more nervous.

He poured tea and handed her a cup. It rattled in her hands. She sipped from it and nibbled on a cookie. “How did I get separated from my mother?”

“We’ll ne’er know,” Thomas said.

“Father asked Donald and Jamilyn to come here to live. Your mother was ill and couldn’t travel when Donald immigrated.”

“Was she pregnant with me?”

“No child,” Thomas said. “My daughter was ne’er well. She had a spell after ye were born and couldna travel. She booked passage months later. We were told the ship was caught in a storm and sank. There were nae survivors.”

“I was wrapped in a white Chantilly lace shawl with a monogram M. It had blood on it.”

“I gave her the shawl for a wedding present,” Sean said.

“My daughter thought her illness was a burden to others. If she were injured during the storm the lass would have stayed behind.” Thomas sighed heavily. “I need to rest now.” He took Kit’s hand again and kissed her fingers. “Sit with me tomorrow. We have much to talk about.”

“I’ve wanted to talk to you since I was old enough to know who you were.”

Thomas shuffled from the room leaning on the servant’s arm.

“Your father is a legend,” she said to Sean.

“He’s yer grandfather, Kitherina.”

She leaned back against the sofa and closed her eyes.

“I can see my sister in yer face.”

“Tell me about her.”

“She had a smile that brought light to the darkness. But it was her voice I remember. When she sang, all God’s creatures sang with her. And she could paint. Her paintings are all over the house.”

Kit’s eyes popped open. “What happened to them?”

“What dae ye mean? They’re on every wall.”

Kit stepped to the fireplace and studied the painting above the mantel. “Where is this castle?”

“Eilean Donan close to Dornie.”

“It’s been restored now—The Castle of Dreams. Some say it’s the most beautiful castle in all of Scotland.” Kit glanced around the room. “I grew up in this house. Every piece of furniture has been preserved. Fabrics are different, colors are different, but every piece is still there. So why didn’t any of my mother’s paintings survive?”

Sean shook his head.

“Why do you think the stone took me to the wrong time?”

“Didna ye say Sean VI found the one of his heart? Maybe ye were to take the stone to him.”

“Maybe,” Kit said.

“Do ye paint, Kitherina?”

“Not as well as my mother. But I’m okay, I guess. Why?”

“Do ye sing?”

“I love music.”

Sean was silent for several moments then asked, “Do ye ride astride with the wind in yer hair?”

He finally asked the one question that broke her, and she buried her face in her hands and wept. Sean sat beside her, pulling her into her arms. “Twill be all right, lass. Twill be all right. I’ll tell ye everything about Jamilyn and ye will come to love her as I do.”

AFTER SUPPER KIT retired to her room—her real room with her cherry four-poster bed. The bed she and Cullen would share. The thought was like biting into something hot, sweet, and delicious, leaving her all warm and tingly.

Sukey had sent someone to turn down the covers and heat the bed with the copper bed warmer. Kit slipped between the sheets and pulled the comforter to her chin.

Her head and heart were turning in opposite directions from all she’d discovered in the past few hours, mixing up her emotions in a huge black cauldron. She needed to let down her hair and race across the pasture. Give her heart a chance to pound her thoughts into proper perspective.

After months of searching for her identity, the truth had been hanging on the wall all along—a portrait of her mother. She had appreciated the woman as only her ancestor. Kit shivered and scooted farther down into the warmth of the bed.

How different would her life have been if she’d grown up in Kentucky in the early 1800s? Would she even have been educated? Not a common occurrence until mid-century. Thomas didn’t have a formal education. Her mother and father had some schooling but probably wouldn’t have encouraged her learning. What would she have had to offer a worldly, educated man like Cullen? What could she have given him that he hadn’t already gotten from scores of other women? Thankfully, she didn’t have to worry about it, but the question would be fun to banter back and forth with him. He would say he would have loved her even if she couldn’t read or write, but she knew in her heart that wasn’t true. His mind needed stimulation as much as…well, as much as the rest of him. Was that why the magic stone sent her on a detour?

Chapter Forty-Six

SEAN ESCORTED KIT to Thomas’s room. She found him in bed with pillows propping him up and a food tray on his lap. A trail of gravy made it obvious he had only moved the meat and potatoes from one side of the plate to the other. Even with Kit’s encouragement, he only took a bite before pushing the tray aside. The valet had shaved him and brushed his hair, but he appeared pale, and when he spoke his weak voice didn’t carry further than a few feet. His eyes, however, gleamed with excitement.

He pointed to a straight-back chair next to his bed. “Sit here, lassie.”

“Kitherina would be more comfortable sitting on the
chaise longue
under the window
.
” Sean said.

Thomas appeared crestfallen.

Kit winked at her uncle. “I’ll be fine.” She sat in the chair beside the bed. “Do you have questions for me?”

“Tell me about the farm.”

Sean quietly left the room and for the next three hours, Kit talked about the farm’s breeding successes and victories on the racetrack. She told him about the Kentucky Derby and that the farm’s stallions had won the prestigious race five times. When he yawned, she left him and went searching for Sean, finding him in the office.

She stood in the doorway, her eyes sweeping the interior. As she had discovered, the only differences in the mansion of the twenty-first century and the mansion of the nineteenth century, besides electricity, heat, and bathrooms, were colors and fabrics and her mother’s paintings hanging on the walls. “This is my favorite room in the entire house.”

He glanced up from a stack of papers on the desk. “Come in, lass.” He rose and walked toward her. “Shall we sit o’er here?” He pointed toward the wing chairs in front of a fire crackling beneath newly added logs. They settled into the chairs. Kit kicked off her shoes and tucked her feet under her folded legs.

“I know ye have questions,” Sean said.

She fingered the locket hanging from a chain around her neck. “I want to know about my father.”

“Aye, Donald and I grew up together. Yer mother loved him. He left here to meet the ship in Norfolk. When he heard it sank, he didnae take the news well. Drank too much, got into a fight, and killed a man by accident. He got scared and ran. We ne’er found him. He might well be dead by now.”

“He’s in San Francisco. At least he was last year.”

Sean sat forward in his chair. “How do ye know?”

“A friend of my husband’s, Braham McCabe—”

“Peter McCabe’s son?”

“Who’s Peter?”

“Peter is Donald McCabe’s brother.”

She drew invisible lines in the air with her index fingers connecting one name to another. “So, if Peter and Donald are brothers and Peter is Braham’s father, that makes Braham—”

“Your first cousin.”

She stared in open-mouth shock and disbelief. Then, she mentally travelled back to the day she met Braham at Fort Laramie. His green eyes seemed so familiar.

“If ye met Braham then ye probably met his friend Cullen.” Sean cocked his head and looked curiously at her wedding ring. “Yes, of course. Ye introduced yourself as Montgomery. In all the excitement, I forgot.”

“Cullen is my husband.”

Sean smiled, showing a dimple in his left cheek she hadn’t noticed before. It mirrored her single dimple. “If my memory serves me right, ye and Cullen were pledged as bairns.”

She gulped. “How’s that possible?”

“Ye mother and Mary Margaret McKenzie were childhood friends. Mary Margaret married William Montgomery, Cullen’s father.”

She couldn’t take her eyes off her uncle, finding it all so hard to believe. “How come neither Cullen nor Braham knew me?”

“Yer mother left Scotland during your first year. Cullen’s mother died, I believe, a few months later.”

“He told me about losing his sister but not his mother.”

“William married again vera soon and they had a bairn right away. Would hae eased the pain for the lad.”

Kit stood, shook off some of the tension the shocking news had caused, then walked over to the window. There was no garden or pergola, but there was a golden view of the rolling hills. “Uncle Sean, where does the magic come from?”

Sean joined her at the window. “That’s a mystery, lass. Family legend says there were once three brooches: a ruby, emerald, and sapphire given to the MacKlenna brothers for rescuing a laird’s kidnapped wife.”

“How long has the brooch been in the family?”

“Four hundred years.”

She gasped. “Have others gone back and forth.”

“Aye, ye be not the first. But tell me lass, where is yer Cullen now?”

“Do you want the short story or the long story?”

He laughed. “Ye are yer mother’s daughter. We have all the time we need. I want the vera long one.”

THOMAS SAT UP in bed and coughed. Blood trickled from the corners of his mouth. Kit wiped his face, remembering doing the same for her granny who died of lung cancer. From what Sean had told her about Thomas’s condition, she suspected his chest pain, shortness of breath, and difficulty breathing were symptomatic of the same disease.

When he fell asleep, she slipped out of his room. Sukey had promised egg salad for lunch, and Kit’s stomach was rumbling.

Sean strode through the front door as she neared the bottom of the stairs. He took her arm and guided her down the remaining stairs. All of her life she’d taken them two at a time without a thought for her safety. Now, wearing the long gowns that Sean had a local seamstress make for her, she realized a misstep could send her tumbling to the hardwood floor and harm her and her child.

“How is Father this morning? I had an early meeting and didn’t visit him fore I left.”

“He’s been busy working on his journal of MacKlenna traditions. I wish I could do more for him. He’s in so much pain. The laudanum helps, but he delays taking it so he can think clearly while he writes and we talk.”

“That’s his decision to make.”

“I want him to be comfortable during the time he has left.”

“How long does he hae?” Sean asked in a curious yet uncertain voice.

Her grandfather would die on January 25, but she couldn’t tell her uncle. She could justify telling him about the Civil War in order to protect the family and the farm, but telling him the date his father would die seemed beyond the pale.

When she didn’t answer right away or drop her gaze, he said, “I shouldn’t have asked.”

She leaned into him and patted his arm affectionately. Thomas would never meet her child and possibly not even her husband. She tried not to worry about Cullen’s journey, but the trip was difficult for healthy people. For him—all alone—it had to be hell.

Sean escorted Kit into the dining room. “Let’s eat. Ye have that look ‘bout ye.”

“What look is that?”

“That ye would kill for food.”

She shuddered. Kill for food? No. Kill for her family? Yes. Sean must have sensed she was remembering things best left forgotten because he pulled her closer.

“Ye hae to let gae of it, Kitherina.”

“The nightmares won’t let me.”

“When ye have yer husband back, the bad dreams will gae awa’.”

Sean pulled her chair away from the table, and she sat. At the sound of footsteps at the doorway, she glanced up to see the butler entering the room.

“Mr. Sean, you have visitors,” Joe said.

Sean sighed impatiently. The number of people he dealt with every day surprised Kit. In the twenty-first century, the farm had a staff person to handle ever situation, especially drop-ins.

“Go on,” she said.

“Are ye sure?”

She spread honey on a slice of apple. “Please go. I’m fine.”

He kissed the top of her head. “I’ll be back in a wee bit.”

She bit into the apple, watching the rainbow of reflections created by the chandelier’s crystal prisms. Multi-colored light danced across the tabletop, inspiring her to paint. If her uncle were called away for the afternoon, she’d set up her easel and work on her grandfather’s portrait.