A penny for an Earl

My son

Often a time life takes from us..A theft we cannot fight against..

“Ye willnae like it, son.” She squeezed his hand as though bracing him. “A month or sae after ye left, she married the oldest Campbell lad. Charles . They live wi’ his mother now at the Campbell farm.”

He scarcely heard a word beyond “married.”

She was married.

His bonnie lass. To another man.

“It’s sorry I am tae be tellin’ ye this now, Jamie. But had I said somethin’ sooner, ye would hae left England before ye had finished yer work. An’ fer what? The deed was done.”

He did not remember rising from the table, nor stalking out of the cottage, slamming the red door, and striding back through the rain to the coach. He scarcely recalled barking directions to the Blackmore coachman and climbing inside.

It was less than a mile to the farm, but for the entire journey, he could only hear his final entreaty to her: “Wait fer me, lass. I shall return.”

She had not answered.

She had not waited.

She had chosen to become a farmer’s wife rather than his.

He wanted to be sick, his stomach churning, his head floating and fogged.

Within minutes, he was rattling Campbell’s door with his fist, noting the green moss upon the wet stones of the old farmhouse. If Charles Campbell could not bother with cleaning the stones around his door, how could he care for a wife? Answer: He could not.

Surely she would have realized that James was a far better choice for husband. Why, then, would she—

The door opened, first a crack, then wide. And there she stood. Fiona.

He breathed, the motion of air into his lungs painful. She was thinner than before, her hair coiled at the back of her head, her gown covered by an apron.

“Jamie?” Her voice was the same, currently soft with wonderment. “I—I didna expect tae see ye … here.” Warm brown eyes scoured him from head to toe.

His cravat and silk waistcoat choked the air out of him.

She stepped back, opening the door wider to a dim interior. “Come in frae the rain. I’ll fetch us some ale.”

“Automatically, he removed his hat, shaking the rainwater from the brim before stepping inside. He’d visited the Campbell farm a handful of times—he and Charles had played in front of the hearth in this room as boys.

Fiona brushed one hand along the side of her head and another along her hip. “No’ sae fine as what ye’re accustomed tae, I’ve nae doubt.”

“Fiona,” he said, the word dragged from the dark, burning stew inside his gut. “Why?”

In her eyes, first lowered and then raised to his, he saw resignation and sadness. “I didna belong wi’ ye, Jamie. I belong here, on a farm. This wis always my place. Ye need a wife who will no’ embarrass ye wi’ her rough ways.”

“Blethers. Ye had only tae wait.”

“I couldna wait.”

“Why?”

She swallowed. Her arms fell loose at her sides as though she knew not what to do with them. “There was a Bairn, Jamie. A son.”

He hadn’t imagined anything could hurt more than learning of her betrayal, but this was … agony. Like being blasted through with molten metal then crushed beneath a two-ton slab of granite. The room shook in his vision. Perhaps it was his head.

“Wh—whose?”

Her lips pressed together. “Yers.”

“Where? Where is—”

“Gone. I am sorry, Jamie.” She covered her mouth with her hand and squeezed her eyes shut briefly before explaining what had happened. After he had left, she’d missed her monthly courses and, fearing she carried his child, had persuaded Charles to wed her, pretending the child was Campbell’s. “A laddie,” she rasped. “I named him John, fer yer faither.”

“Where is he?” he growled.

“In the last weeks of carryin’, a fever burned through Netherdunnie. It took hold of me. When he came, he was weak. Too weak.”

A tear tracked down her cheek. “He died no’ three days after he was born.”

The granite slab was grinding his bones. Grinding him to dust.

“Where is my son?” He cared nothing for the gritted roar of his demand.

She had hidden this from him.

He would have returned to Netherdunnie.

He would have come back and married her, had she only written to tell him the truth. He would have cared for her properly, made her a countess, for Christ’s sake. Taken her away from here.

Then, his son—his son—would have lived.

“We buried him on the brae, beneath the largest willow. There is a marker there. McFadden’s work. I—I planted daisies.”

He left without saying goodbye. Left her there, tears upon her cheeks, clinging to the frame of the open door. But that did not matter. He could barely see through the rain, but he remembered the hill, several hundred yards from the farmhouse, topped by a small copse of willow and birch. By the time he reached the tiny gravemarker, he was soaked and cold, the linen of his shirt and cravat a sodden skin leaching all heat from his blood.

McFadden had done well, chiseling gray granite into an elaborate cross. Etching the name of his son—his son—into the hard stone.

John. After Jamie’s father.

Jamie’s knees were in the mud, now. His hand clutched the cross until he feared it might crack. It did not, of course. Granite was dense and tough by nature.

It resisted. Endured.

No, it was not the stone that fractured beneath the dripping willow and his great, muckle fist.

Instead, it was he that cracked.

cleaving forever in two.