Mrs. McVinnie's London Season

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,
brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously.

Cover design by Sabrina Sun

Author Photo by Bryner Photography

Mrs. McVinnie’s London Season

Copyright © 1990, 2014 by Carla Kelly

First published in 1990 by Signet, an imprint of
Penguin Books USA, Inc.

ISBN: 978-1-60381-955-8 (Trade Paper)

ISBN: 978-1-60381-956-5 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number:
 2014938125

Produced in the United States of America

* * *

Had we never lov’d sae kindly,

Had we never lov’d sae blindly,

Never met—nor never parted,

We had ne’er been broken-hearted.

—
Robert Burns

* * *

S
he heard the postman’s whistle at her own front door
almost before she turned the corner and set her feet toward Abbey
Head. Jeannie McVinnie stood still a moment in the roadway. She
nodded to the other women, baskets over their arms, who were headed
in a purposeful cluster toward the greengrocer’s. After another nod
and a bow to the minister’s new bride, Jeannie twitched her plaid
up a little higher about her shoulders and continued on down the
street.

She was not the kind of
woman who backtracked. Jeannie no longer believed her mother’s
admonition that to turn back, once having set out, would bring down
all manner of misery and bad fortune. She was not superstitious,
but still, she would not have retraced her steps.

Besides, Galen was
there, and in a grumpy mood. It would do him good to stir from his
armchair, where everything was laid out within easy reach, and
hobble to the front door. Now that his color was much improved and
his melancholy in large part gone, Jeannie felt compelled to force
a little exertion upon her father-in-law. He had no cause to chafe
about the fit of his wooden leg. The surgeon had declared the
amputation a thing of beauty, going so far as to summon his
colleagues from the University of Edinburgh to exclaim and proclaim
until Galen McVinnie was heartily tempted to unstrap the leg and
beat the physics about the head with it.

A walk to the door
would do him good, she told herself as she turned her head against
the little mist that seemed to rise from the ground. She paused
again and considered tramping over the road past the church and
toward Gatehouse of Fleet. She discarded the notion; the
rhododendrons were not yet in bloom. She would wait for that
event.

Jeannie turned again
toward Abbey Head. It was a walk of some five miles, affording
ample time for reflection, but not too much. She did not trouble
herself about the letter. Undoubtedly it was for Galen McVinnie,
late a major of His Majesty’s Fifteenth Dumfries Rifles. For the
past year as the shocking news had spread farther and farther away,
like a pebble tossed into Wigtown Bay, letters had dribbled in.

When Galen could not
raise his head off the pillow, Jeannie had answered the first spate
of letters, stopping often because she could not see through her
tears to write. Calmly she accepted the condolences of Tom’s death
and the prayers for Galen’s speedy recovery.

During those dark days
of the Scottish winter, Jeannie McVinnie had come to dread the
postman’s whistle. It only meant more letters, more explanations.
When Galen could sit upright again and his handwriting was steady
enough, she gladly surrendered the correspondence to him.

Her father-in-law kept
up a series of letters to particular friends, and as the year of
mourning wore on, the missives of concern turned into invitations
to visit. Only yesterday there had been a note scrawled on quite
good rag paper and franked by a lord, requesting his attendance at
a regimental gathering in Dumfries.

“
It is
not very far, Jeannie,” Major McVinnie had said, and there was
something wistful in his voice that made her turn her head so he
could not see her smile.

“
Indeed not, Father McVinnie,” she had replied, knowing better
than to attempt to make up his mind for him. Thomas had been woven
of the same plaid; and she had learned early in her brief tenure at
marriage not to press the issue.

In the end, last night
Galen decided against the gathering. “Jeannie, too many questions,”
he said as he refolded the paper and laid it aside. “Perhaps some
other time.”

But she had found him
looking at the note again before she escorted him upstairs to bed
that night. “Still, I could not leave you here alone, my dear, now
could I?”

His words were kind;
they were always kind. But more and more, it was that condescending
kindness of the strong for the weak. He was measuring her each day,
and finding her lacking, even as he smiled. He watched her when he
thought she wasn’t aware, but she was always aware. And what he
saw, he did not like.

The mist lifted and
allowed the sunshine to stream through the clouds. Jeannie turned
her face toward it. She knew it would be brief. March sunlight
served only to keep heart in the body until spring’s tardy arrival
to the lowlands. She took a deep breath, mindful that already there
was something of spring in the air.

“
The
spring of 1810,” she said out loud, as if to allow it official
recognition. The spring of 1809 had passed without fanfare, other
than to be marked with an X on each calendar square, the symbol of
one more day got through without Thomas McVinnie.

An hour’s brisk walk
brought her to the head, crowned by the ruins of an abbey. It was
too early in the year for the young ladies of St. Andrews’ Select
Female Academy to be grouped here and there about the picturesque
stones, their heads bent diligently over sketching pads, so she had
the place to herself. Even the sea gulls normally in residence were
wheeling far overhead on the air currents.

In a moment she had
perched herself into the shell that had once formed a window
overlooking the bay. She sat still, reflecting, not for the first
time, on the quality of Scottish woolens, effective even against
cold abbey stones.

Jeannie smiled to
herself, remembering again that over oatmeal that morning Galen had
looked at the invitation from Dumfries. “I wonder, my dear, if that
part of the regiment from Canada—Bartley’s company—will be
there.”

A sea gull, irritated
at the intrusion upon the abbey, swooped lower to investigate.
Jeannie took one of last night’s scones from her pocket, crumbled
it, and tossed it toward the bay. The sea gull ignored her for
several more moments and then condescended to alight and peck among
the stones.

Jeannie sighed and sunk
her hands deep in her pockets. Galen McVinnie was restless to go to
Dumfries, but he would make no move as long as she remained with
him in Kirkcudbright. It was time for her to move along. Galen
still had a life to live, even if hers was over.

“
And
where might I move to, may I ask?” she questioned the gull, which
hopped a few steps farther away and regarded her with a red
eye.

Mother and father were
dead long since. Agnes had dutifully invited her to join them in
Edinburgh, but Jeannie knew the size of her sister’s house and just
as politely declined. Her two brothers served in India. They had
invited her to the subcontinent, but she did not relish a long sea
voyage. She was not very fond of water.

But it was more than
that; she knew it and her brothers knew it. At the end of the long
journey, there would be row upon row of officers ready to propose,
eager to marry a white woman from Britain, all the more so if she
were not hard to look at and moderately endowed. Jeannie McVinnie
was not ready to cast herself upon the marriage mart so soon after
Thomas’ death.

“
Surely you will agree, friend bird,” she said to the gull,
which hopped closer, “that the consideration of one’s second
husband is possibly a matter for some serious thought. And I choose
not to think about it yet. India can wait.”

If it was not to be
India, what, then? She knew she must remarry. It was a cold-blooded
reflection that had cost her many a night’s sleep. The knowledge
that she was destined to marry again, duty-bound, had chased about
in her head until she was weary of it. And always by the time
morning came, she was fully awake to the fact that she had no
desire to sleep in anyone’s arms but Tom’s, and now it was too late
for that.

Jeannie hopped down
from the ledge and shooed the gull away with her skirts. It rose in
an indignant fluff of white, hissing at her, as she walked closer
to the cliff overhanging the bay.

A small boat of
indeterminate type tacked across the bay, searching about for a bit
of wind to bring it safely in. Jeannie shaded her eyes with her
hand and watched it.

I would be a sailor,
she thought suddenly, and let the wind blow me where it chose. She
sighed. If only I could feel some harmony with the sea.

But she would never be
a sailor, or a soldier, or a doctor like her father, or a
greengrocer, or a vicar. The only path open to her was marriage. As
she stood watching the boat in the bay, Jeannie decided to
entertain the notion. Somewhere in the wide world, there must be
another man for her. She might not love, but she could like.

“
And
he needn’t be handsome,” she told the gull, which had plummeted to
earth again, chattering and scolding behind her back. “One cannot
have such good fortune twice in a row. He must be amiable, however,
and good-natured and polite. A wealthy man would be an excellent
thing, too.”

The thought made her
smile. “Where you expect to find a wealthy man, where none existed
before, I cannot imagine, Jeannie,” she told herself.

She walked back to the
abbey ruins and leaned against the ledge. “And while I am about it,
he should be wondrous fond of children and devoted entirely to the
finer things in life.”

The idea was so
improbable that she laughed out loud, noting with surprise that it
was the first time in a year she had done so. “Such a paragon I
have created,” she told the gull. “The wonder of it would be if
such a man old enough for me was still safe from Parson’s
Mousetrap!” It felt good to laugh, and she was still smiling to
herself as she set her face toward Kirkcudbright again and the
little stone house on McDermott Street.

Mrs. MacDonald was out
to market when Jeannie returned. The housekeeper had vowed after
breakfast to come home with a joint of mutton, “or die in the
attempt, Mrs. McV,” she had declared as she put on her hat and
battened it down in anticipation of Kirkcudbright’s wind.

The subject was a sore
one, and Mrs. McDonald was not one to let a topic wither without a
good shake. “Although why it should be so hard to get a good joint
of mutton in Scotland, I canna fathom. Do our soldiers in Spain eat
so much that there’s not even a dab left for pepper pot? Explain it
to me again, Mrs. McV.”

And Jeannie had
patiently explained again that wartime causes shortages of the most
inexplicable commodities, even mutton in Scotland.