The Secret Gift (14 page)

“Hello, Mr. Dugan.”

“Kathleen said you were calling from overseas. Still in the U.K.?”

All the words she’d prepared to say to him suddenly took flight, leaving her mind as blank as a plank.

“Isabella? Is something wrong?”

She closed her eyes and said merely, “I know the truth.”

His responding silence confirmed for her that he, too, knew.

She heard him say, “Kathleen, would you please close the door?” He said to her a moment later, “I wondered when you’d call.”

She didn’t answer him. Instead she tightened her fingers around the receiver and said in a voice that betrayed her tumbling emotions, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

With those words, the tears that Libby had spent the past several hours holding in check came flooding forward. She bit her bottom lip, squeezing her eyes to try to stop them from coming. Her breathing hitched. She swallowed hard.

“I couldn’t tell you, Libby. It was your mother’s wish. She wanted you to go to Scotland, to learn everything for yourself.”

“But I don’t understand. What am I supposed to be learning? My father is Charles Hutchinson. It says so on my birth certificate. I have a copy of it with me right here.”

“That is an amended birth certificate. It was changed after you were legally adopted by him when you were an infant.” He paused. “I do not know everything, only what Matilde told me when she and your father first came to my office to seek the adoption. But one thing I do know, Libby, is that Charles Hutchinson was your father in most every possible way. He provided for you and your mother. He raised you. He watched over you. He loved you for nearly the whole of your life. The only thing he didn’t do was play a part in your conception.”

Libby sniffed, struggling to gather her emotions. He gave her a moment.

“Libby, what have you learned about your mother’s life in Scotland?”

“I know that she worked at the Mackay castle. She met and fell in love with the son of the laird. His name was Fraser Mackay. Presumably she found herself pregnant, and they married secretly. But his family wouldn’t accept her. They didn’t think that she, a housemaid, was good enough to be the wife of the laird. Fraser thought to convince them, but then something happened. There was an accident. He drowned. My mother and her family were evicted from their home by the laird. That is all I know. I don’t know where they went, or how my mother came to live in America.”

Dugan supplied the rest. “Your mother was a widow, pregnant, and penniless when she left the village. She went with her parents to Glasgow, where she met Charles Hutchinson. He was an American professor working at university there for the summer and she had gotten work at the library. He’d asked her to help him with some research. By the end of that summer, he’d convinced her to marry him and return with him to the States so he could provide for her, and be a father to you.”

“But she left her parents, her family, behind. Why did she never come back, even once, to visit them?”

“She was frightened, Libby. Frightened for you.”

“For me? Why?”

“The Mackays were a powerful family then. She was afraid if the laird and Lady Mackay discovered where she was, who you were, they would come after you, claim custody in Fraser’s name, and she would never see you again. Without Fraser, they had no heir. Matilde asked me to make inquiries every so often after the welfare of her family. Her parents, having lived all their lives in the Highland air, didn’t fare well in the city tenements in Glasgow. They didn’t last very long after she left.” Dugan exhaled slowly. “I’m sorry, Isabella. I couldn’t tell you this earlier. Your mother would permit me to reveal it to you only after you had gone there—and after she had passed away.”

Libby dropped her head, leaning against the receiver she held to her ear. “I just don’t understand why she never told me. We shared everything. At least I thought it was everything.”

She fell silent as she fought to absorb it all.

So much. So very much. It overwhelmed her to the point that she wondered if she could still breathe. It seemed as if everything she had ever known in her life was gone, swept away like images on a chalkboard, leaving her now with an empty, dusty slate.

And then Ian M’Cuick’s words echoed through her thoughts.

You’re the Mackay heir ...

The heir.

“Libby, what will you do now? Will you come home?”

She lifted her head, taking a deep breath. “I’m not certain just yet.”

“Well, be sure to stop by the office when you get back. We’ve some things to discuss, about the house—”

“Dugan?”

“Hmm?”

“I wonder if you would help me with something.”

A half hour later, Libby hung up the phone feeling slightly better than she had upon picking it up.

By the end of that phone call she had managed to come to some semblance of acceptance with the truth of her paternity. It didn’t change anything she felt about the father she had known, about the memory of the childhood he’d given her. Charles Hutchinson would always—
always
—be her father. And she could almost come to terms with her mother’s reasons for keeping it from her, although it made her feel as if she hadn’t really known her mother at all.

But she was here, in Scotland, in the village. And so, she would get to know her. She would get to know her mother, and the man who had been her father, through the place, the village where they had been born, where they’d grown up.

And where they had fallen in love.

“Excuse me, sir?”

Graeme looked up from the drawing table he’d been bent over for most of the day. He blinked, pressing his fingers against his tired eyes as he turned. The housekeeper, Flora Something, he could never seem to remember her last name, stood hovering in his office doorway.

“I’ve left your supper on the stove, and I’ve finished up all the other things needed done, so I’m goin’ to head home for the e’ening, aye?”

Graeme glanced at the clock. Five o’clock. He knew she had a family of her own to see to in the village, children who were no doubt waiting for their supper and missing their mother. “Yes, that’s fine, Flora. Thank you.”

“The stew is simmering, so you can hae it whene’er you’re ready to eat. There’s fresh scones in the warmer, too.”

“Thank you. I’ll see you in the morning, then.”

The woman nodded as she backed out of the room.

Graeme remained in the office until he’d heard her close the front door behind her, watching out the window as she disappeared down the footpath that led to her cottage on the outskirts of the village.

He’d hired Flora for just that reason. She lived close enough to walk to her home, and she had a family of her own to tend to, thereby doing away with any notion that she would live at the castle. She was also the sister of Angus MacLeith, the village constable, a widow who could use the money he paid her and who wouldn’t be prone to gossiping. The arrangement had worked out perfectly. Most of the time Graeme could fend for himself. He needed someone only to help out with the housekeeping, the laundry, and cooking. Breakfast the other morning had proved he was pretty hopeless when it came to the kitchen.

As had happened more than once in the past couple of days, thoughts of that breakfast brought thoughts of the young woman who had spent the night curled up on his sofa. Much as he didn’t care to admit it, he’d been disappointed to see her leave so early that day. He’d enjoyed having her company that morning, the lively and interesting conversation. And the sight of her wearing his sweater, her dark hair tousled from sleep around a particularly fresh and lovely face, certainly hadn’t been any hardship either.

He just didn’t know what to make of her.

Having spent months as the Most Hunted Bachelor on British Soil, Graeme had become adept at recognizing the usual indicators—the coy smiles and knowing glances, the calculated attempts at seduction. Libby Hutchinson, however, had shown none of these signs even though she’d had plenty of opportunity.

When they had been alone, she hadn’t so much as tried to charm him, flirt with him, or climb into bed with him. Instead she’d preferred curling up with an old book on the sofa after raiding his freezer for the Häagen-Dazs.

Graeme turned from his drawing table and walked the hallway to the back stairs. When he reached the bottom, the kitchen yawned before him, empty and silent. A single plate, a fork, and a knife sat upon the butcher’s block waiting for him.

For him alone.

The idea of sitting in that vast dining room, alone at one end of that vast, elegant table, held no particular appeal, so instead Graeme clicked on the television that sat on the kitchen counter just as the BBC News came on.

He put on the kettle for tea, listening with half an ear to the day’s top stories. He was hunched before a cupboard looking through the tea rack when the familiar sound of his mother’s voice came trilling from the television set.

He looked up, not at all surprised to see her standing before Westminster Hall, graciously debating the most recent round of reforms in the House of Lords. She was, after all, one of the only ninety-two hereditary peers who had managed to keep their seats in the recently reformed House and one of the sparse few women who populated that great hall. A peeress in her own right and an indefatigable campaigner against such things as genetically modified crops and inequities in the public health service, Gemma Mackenzie, Countess of Abermuir, took her place in the churning machine of British politics very seriously.

It was a role he would one day find himself playing as well, for despite the fact that his love had always been—would always be—architecture, politics were a tradition on both sides of his family, and a tradition that must endure at all costs.

Graeme stood for a moment and watched his mother. It was impossible not to be impressed by her. Despite the fact that she’d exceeded her sixtieth birthday, she possessed a timeless beauty and elegance that only grew more perceptible the older she got. A creamy set of pearls draped a graceful neck that in her younger days had been likened to that of a swan. Dark hair, modestly touched with gray, was perfectly coiffed in a neat French twist.

She’d married his father, a younger son of the Duke of Gransborough, after a long and steady courtship that had played out in the society pages. It was a brilliant match, a mix of his prestigious lineage and her unfettered political aspirations. Gemma Mackenzie was the only child and heir of the Earl of Abermuir, a title that quite fortunately could be passed through the female line in absence of a male heir. The only stipulation was that whoever the future countess married would need to take the Mackenzie name.

It hadn’t been any issue for Graeme’s father, Maxwell Gransworth. As the youngest of three sons to his father, the duke, his chances of inheriting were next to nil. When asked, he admitted he rather liked the sound of “Maxwell Mackenzie”—made him sound rather like a Scottish James Bond, he’d say. They’d married in London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral in a ceremony that had been attended by the queen. A year later, they’d heralded the arrival of his brother, Thaddeus, or Teddy for short.

Three years after that, they’d had Graeme.

Graeme had been nine years old when his mother’s father, the Old Earl, as they’d called him, had died. She’d become a countess and had dived into the political pool seemingly overnight. She’d been at it nonstop ever since.

“So, Lady Abermuir, on a lighter note ...” asked the reporter, “how about answering the question currently pressing on the minds of countless hopeful young single women all across Britain? Just where is your son, Lord Waltham, hiding himself these days?”

Graeme frowned at the smirking reporter on the screen, awaiting his mother’s response.

Consummate professional that she was, she scarcely batted an eye. “He is in hiding, you say?” She laughed. “How can that be, sir, when I speak to my son nearly every day?”

And with that, she nodded her head, smiled, and said a parting thank-you, leaving the interviewer little opportunity to pursue the line of questioning any further.

Brava, Mother.

Graeme switched off the television. It was then that he heard a distant knocking coming from the front of the house.

Now what?

Still stung by the television reporter’s snooping, he yanked the front door open and, without even looking to see who awaited on the other side, barked, “What?”

Libby Hutchinson stood there, looking at him uncertainly. “I, uh ... I was just bringing back your things.”

She held out the sweater and pants he had loaned her.

He simply stared at her.

“They’re—” She hesitated, blinked. “They’re freshly washed.”

“Yes, well, thank you,” he managed. At her wounded expression, he shook off the dark mood that the television news had given him. “My apologies. That was unforgivably rude. It’s been—” He shook his head. “It’s been rather a long day.”

She looked at him.

There came a whistling noise from the back of the house.

The tea kettle.

Graeme turned, looked back. “Say, I have a pot of stew and some fresh scones for supper. Would you ...” He hesitated just a moment, and then threw caution to the wind. “Would you like to stay for dinner?”

She smiled, nodded. “Yes, sure. That would be nice.”

Libby closed the front door and hung her jacket on the hook as Graeme hurried back to the kitchen to check the insistent whistling. She came in just as he was grabbing the wheezing kettle and shutting off the fire. She noticed the lone plate sitting on the butcher block, the single set of utensils. It was a sight she’d seen so many times in her own apartment back in New York.

She’d spent the day wandering around the village, and then had asked Ian if he could direct her to the place where her mother’s family had once lived and farmed. He’d shown it to her on the map, and she’d gone, although all that remained was the blackened rubble of what had once been a family’s home. It had left her feeling more miserable than she could have ever imagined. Without even realizing it, she’d found herself taking the turn toward the castle, having no real reason for doing so.