Whence Came a Prince (73 page)

Jamie looked across the bed at the woman who’d seen Leana through so many difficult days. “ ’Tis good to have you here, Neda.”

Neda pushed back an errant curl with the heel of her hand. “The Laird kenned I’d be needed.”

He gazed down at Leana. “How long until …”

“ ’Tis hard tae say, Mr. McKie. Not sae lang wi’ a second bairn.”

“But she’s … all right.”

“Och! Leana was made tae be a mither. Isna yer Ian proof o’ that?” Neda’s smile reassured him as much as her words did. “A’ she needs is time. And privacy. If ye’ll keep folk awa from her door …”

Including me?
He did not need to ask. Resigned, he kissed his wife’s hand once more. “It seems the women want you all to themselves, Leana.”

“Nae.” Her gaze locked with his. “I want you, Jamie. With me.”

“You are certain?” The clear light in her eyes answered his question. “Are you … afraid, Leana?”

“Only of losing sight of you.” She turned to Neda. “Will you mind if he stays?”

Neda rolled her eyes. “ ’Tis not done, lass. Menfolk dinna ken …”

“But Jamie does. We were together … with Rose …”

When Leana looked at him, he understood. She was doing this for him. So he would not wait in fear. “Leana, if you truly want me … I would be honored.”

She smiled. “Find my husband a chair.”

Jamie was soon settled by her side, his coat and waistcoat thrown over the dresser, the sleeves of his wedding shirt rolled up past his elbows. Whatever was required of him, he would do. For Leana. For their child.

Neda and Jeanie brought in the rest of the pink roses and arranged them round her bed. The sweet fragrance was heady, almost overpowering.

“How beautiful.” Leana closed her eyes as another contraction made her draw her knees toward her chest.

Jamie did not know what to expect—what gentleman would?—but he did not turn away when her pains increased. Instead he gripped her hand and pressed a cool cloth to her brow. He spoke words of encouragement, taking his cue from Neda and Jeanie, who hovered nearby.
“Good, Leana. Keep breathing. I am so proud of you, beloved. Our child will be here soon.”

Afternoon faded into the gloaming, and still she labored. Down the stair, the music grew louder, the laughter more boisterous. But in the laird’s bedroom, a quiet miracle was unfolding. The woman he loved was laboring to bring forth their child, and he was doing his best to labor with her as night fell across the glen. Damp hair clung to her face, and tears coursed down her cheeks, yet her mouth was dry and cracked. Neda cautioned him that he could not give her water, only wet her lips with his fingertip, which he did repeatedly.

“Be thou my strong rock,” Leana pleaded between efforts. “Be thou my helper.”

At first Jamie leaned forward, thinking she was speaking to him. Then he realized the truth: She was speaking to the Almighty.

“My times are in thy hand.” Leana’s words dissolved into a groan. “Deliver me. Please … deliver me!”

Jamie could see that she was suffering, felt the tension in her body, saw the pain on her features. “What can I do, Leana?”

She gripped his hand harder. “Pray.”

His head fell forward, tears dropping onto the crumpled sheets.
This is the woman I love, Lord. This is the woman you gave to me. Have mercy on her. Strengthen her. Protect her. Please, Lord. Please deliver this child.

Neda touched his shoulder. “Mr. McKie, I’d best take that seat unless ye want tae handle things yerself.”

He was on his feet before he remembered standing.

Leana did not let go of his hand. “Here. With me.” She pulled him next to her at the head of the bed while Neda folded back the sheets, giving instructions.

Jamie knelt by her side, vowing he would not make a fool of himself and faint. If his wife could bear it, he would bear it with her. “I am here, Leana. I am with you.”

“Jamie!” She cried out his name as her face contorted.

Neda’s voice. Decisive. “Push noo, lass. Ye’re almost thar.”

Then she
was
there. And the babe was there. Pink, wet, beautiful.

Neda’s voice again. Exultant. “A daughter for ye, Mr. McKie!”

Leana was weeping with relief. Jamie was simply weeping.
Thanks be to God!
He wiped his face on a corner of the sheet, then kissed his bride. The mother of his son. And of his daughter, whose vigorous cry was even louder than the piper down the stair.

“Davina.” Leana almost sang the child’s name.

“A wonderful choice.” Jamie moistened her lips with his tears as he kissed her, while Neda tucked a clean sheet round her for modesty’s sake.

Moments later the midwife came forward with their child wrapped in fresh linen. “Here’s yer lass, Mistress McKie.”

Leana smiled. “How I do love the sound of that name.” She nodded toward Jamie. “Let my husband hold her first.”

Jamie’s arms shook as the midwife laid his newborn daughter in the crook of his arm. “Davina,” he whispered, sniffing hard. She was tiny. Delicate. Perfect in every way. “I am … your father.” He swallowed, though it did not help. “And this is your dear mother.” He carefully transferred the warm bundle into Leana’s waiting arms.

She touched her nose, her cheek, her tiny chin. “My precious girl.”

A knock at the door and a squeal of joy announced another arrival. Jeanie cracked open the door and waved the maidservant inside. Eliza barely stepped inside the room before she paused and curtsied, her eyes wide. “Mr. McKie, pardon me, but ’tis Ian. He heard the bairn. And … I did … too.”

“Come, my dear boy!” Leana motioned with her free hand. “Your sister is here.”

Eliza approached the bed with obvious misgivings, but Ian had none, waving his arms, reaching for his mother.

Jamie intervened, capturing his son and holding him firmly against his chest. “Your mother’s arms are full just now. What do you think of Davina? Isn’t she a bonny wee lass?” Ian stared at the bundle and blinked.

“Did you notice her hair?” Leana pulled back the linen round their tiny daughter’s head. “Not dark brown like yours or gold like mine.”

Jamie peered at her in disbelief. “
Red?
”

Leana laughed. “Another red-headed McKie, like your brother.”

“Mistress,” Neda said softly, “d’ye ken the day? ’Tis a Tuesday.”

Leana’s smile was like candlelight, brightening the room. “Ian,
you
were born on the Sabbath day, which means you are ‘blithe and bonny and good and gay.’ But Tuesday’s child is full of grace.”

Jamie gazed down at his wife.
Like you, dear woman.

When Ian began to wiggle, Jamie handed him back to Eliza rather than risk the child accidentally kicking Leana’s tender body. “There’s a good lad. You can still see your sister.” He caught Neda’s eye. “Kindly find your husband and have him bring my father up the stair.”

Leana laughed. “You’ll have the entire household in our room before we’re through.”

“Indeed I will not. They can gather in the sitting room. For ’tis our wedding night and time I had you to myself.” He turned round. “Eliza? Jeanie, might you …”

Both women were already halfway out of the room. They curtsied before they closed the door behind them. Down the stair the fiddler still fiddled and the piper still piped, yet in the laird’s bedroom, silence was music enough.

Jamie leaned down and cupped Davina’s head, surprised at how warm it was. And how small. “You have given me a fine daughter, Leana.”

His wife’s sweet breath was warm on his ear. “And you have given me a fine home.”

“Glentrool, you mean?” When she didn’t answer, he turned his head, dismayed to find tears in her eyes. “What is it, lass?”

Leana touched his heart. “This is where I’d always hoped to live.”

“Ah.” Jamie pulled her close for a tender kiss. “Then come home, my love.”

From my first visit, the quiet corner of South West Scotland known as Galloway felt like home. The rolling farmlands resembled my native Pennsylvania, and the dry stane dykes brought to mind the stone fences of the Bluegrass State. But there all comparisons end, for Galloway is like nowhere else on earth. The red sandstone ruins of thirteenth-century Sweetheart Abbey still rise from the heart of New Abbey (aye, two words now). Cardoness Castle has stood like a silent sentinel overlooking the River Fleet since the late fifteenth century. Dotting the countryside are sleepy villages, many no wider than one street with a row of stone cottages on each side. Sheep wander across single-track roads, and belted Galloway cattle—“belties,” with black bodies and wide white stripes around their middles—nibble contentedly in grassy pastures.

Some Scottish writers, like S. R. Crockett, favor the name “Grey Galloway.” One wintry visit, after endless days of gray skies, gray hills, and gray lochs, I quite agreed! But in spring when the word
green
is not sufficient to describe the verdant landscape, and in summer when the deep pink flowers of Rosebay Willowherb bloom along the roadside, and in early autumn when purple heather covers the hills—then Galloway is anything but gray and gloomy. Though I must confess, I
like
dreich weather. Thick fog and drizzling rain turn my cozy study into a writer’s paradise. On such days, I roam across Galloway in my heart and on the page, endeavoring to take my readers with me.

In Jamie McKie’s time we would have traversed the old military road, which carved a hundred-mile swath from the Bridge of Sark to Portpatrick. Along its route sprouted villages like Twyneholm, though
the parish kirk stood its ground long before Major Rickson and his men appeared in the mid-1700s with their sledgehammers and gunpowder. Young soldiers constructed a blacksmith forge every ten miles, working their way across Galloway, building a road that provided English troops a faster means of quelling any troubles in Ireland. A modern Ordnance Survey map shows sections of the old military road still in use—from Haugh of Urr to Castle Douglas (Carlinwark in 1790) and from Twynholm (no
e
now) to Gatehouse of Fleet. How fortunate that the shore road between Gatehouse and Ferrytown was completed by 1790, just in time for mail coach service on that route to begin—and for our story to unfold.

When Leana pulled the almanac from her father’s bookshelf—
Season on the Seasons
—I was holding such a book in my hands, though it was the following years edition, dated 1791. The volume was bound in gilded red leather with seven other almanacs of the same year—
The Gentleman’s Diary, The Ladies’ Diary, Old Poor Robin’s Almanack
among them—all published in London. The rebus about the daughter with two evergreen names must remain unsolved, I’m afraid, unless you happen across Henry Seasons almanac for 1792.

Alastair Penman’s book
Some Customs, Folklore and Superstitions of Galloway
proved particularly helpful in describing the stone fire and local funeral customs. Mr. Penman’s booklet
Rhonehouse or Keltonhill: Its History Its Fair and Some of Its Surroundings
and Malcolm Harper’s
Rambles in Galloway
(1896) were invaluable resources for recreating a Keltonhill Fair of long ago.

As to how Keltonhill Fair got its start, Duncan Hastings is eager to relate the story: “Ane fine simmer day a packman—or chapman or peddler or whatsomever ye like—from Glesca decided his goods needed an airin’. He spread them across a thicket o’ gorse on the side o’ the hill near the auld Kelton kirk. Curious folk came along, buyin’ this and that, and afore the day was o’er, he’d sold nearly a’ he had. He vowed tae return tae the same place twelvemonth hence, and so he did, bringin’ ither packmen wi’ him. Then came the horse dealers and the hawkers and afore lang …” Aye, Duncan. We’ve been to Keltonhill Fair.

As the epigraph here suggests, birch and rowan abound in Gal
loway, even as ancient trees dot the pages of
Whence Came a Prince.
In Creetown (Ferrytown of Cree’s “new” name after it became a Burgh of Barony in 1792), I took photos of the Ferry Thorn, where a small flock of sheep—surely they were Jamie’s—tarried beside the burn. I also carried home an acorn plucked from Buittle kirkyard, where Leana brought Jock Bells wagon to a stop beneath a stand of oaks, and later the same week I gazed up at the centuries-old yew tree in the kirkyard at Monigaff (one
n
was lost along the way) and searched about for a certain headstone bearing a carved floral wreath.

On my second visit to the Murray arms in Gatehouse of Fleet, I slept in the room at the top of the stair where Rose bravely hid her father’s gold beneath her skirts. Then I spent a meaningful hour in the room where Jamie and Lachlan had their initial confrontation. Three years later, as it were, Robert. Burns penned his famous ode to Bannockburn, “Scots, Wha Hae,” in that very room. Thomas Newbigging, in his charming book
A Nook in Galloway
(1911), described the fateful night. On August 1, 1793, after a visit to Kenmure Castle, Burns and his companion “encountered a terrific storm of wind, lightning, and rain, whilst riding across the moors.” When they arrived at the Murray arms, “the poet entered the room mentioned, sat down at the table, and wrote out the ode which he had composed on the way.” Though said table is long gone, I touched the present one and thought of our travelers in August 1790.

At the Burns Museum in Alloway I smiled when I read a snippet of the writers correspondence with his editor: “Your proposed alterations would, in my opinion, make it tame. So, if you please, will you let the line stand as it is.” I am blessed to work with a wonderful team of editors whose “proposed alterations” invariably improve my efforts. To these dear encouragers who examined every word of
Prince
and offered priceless advice go my deepest thanks: Sara Fortenberry, Dudley Delffs, Carol Bartley, Danelle McCafferty, and Paul Hawley. I’m also grateful for proofreaders like Leesa Gagel and Nancy Norris—not to mention my own sweet husband, Bill—who take turns catching stray typos before they end up in print.