Once Upon a Tartan

gone quiet—though even the quiet was a maddening kind of distraction.

Riding with Fiona had been intended to foster the child’s trust, to tantalize her with the pleasures she craved most, and it had likely achieved those ends. It had achieved other ends as well, inconvenient, complicated ends, like making Tye aware of Fiona not as a pawn in the ongoing chess match with his father, but as a child who missed her mother.

Tye’s sisters missed their mother.

Hell, he missed his mother.

Fiona’s shameless craving to know more of her father reminded Tye that he was also a man who missed his brother, flawed though the adult fraternal relationship had been. He rose from his desk and went to the window, where a full moon was casting the gardens in silvery shadows. A drink was in order, a nightcap.

Several nightcaps.

He passed through the darkened house quietly, but had to pause at the head of the stairs. A sound disturbed the peace of the old house, a sound from within the walls. He followed that sound into the family wing, pausing outside a closed door.

Lady Ariadne slept downstairs, Miss Hester slept in the guest wing. He tapped on the door. “Child, open this door.”

If anything, the weeping became more distinct. Tye pushed the door open and entered Fiona’s room. She should have been housed on the higher floor, near if not adjoined to the nursery, though with Lady Ariadne downstairs and Miss Daniels on the opposite side of the house, the family wing was almost as isolated as the nursery.

“Fiona, are you hurt?”

“Yes.” She hoo-hoo-hoo’d into her pillow, making Tye regret the impulse that brought him here.

“Is it your foot again?” Stupid question, but he’d ask her a hundred questions to stop her damned racket.

“It’s not my f-foot. I want my mama.”

She threw herself over on her side and sobbed afresh into her pillow. “I want my m-mama, and my papa, and they’re gone, and I don’t even know where Berlin or those other places are!”

“For God’s sake…” He took a seat on the bed. “See here, child. This won’t help.”

God help him, he sounded like his father. More than ever.

“Go away. You’re mean, and I don’t have to listen to you.”

Back to that. Tentatively, he reached out a hand and tugged one ratty red braid free from where it was creased along her neck. “Sending me away won’t make your parents come home sooner.”

She lifted her head off the pillow far enough glare at him in the moonlight. “I know that, but I miss them. They hardly ever write, and I’m stuck here. Uncle Ian and Aunt Augusta never come visit because of that stupid, stinky baby, and they’re supposed to help look after me.”

“Well, I’ve come to look after you. Move over.”

Fiona moved about two inches left. The little bed creaked under his weight as Tye shifted to lean back against the headboard.

He got out his handkerchief. “I went to public school when I was about your age, you know.”

“Is that where you learned to talk like the Wrath of God?”

She allowed him to wipe the tears from her face, then caught his hand and held the handkerchief to her nose while she honked.

“I do not speak like the Wrath of God.” He folded the handkerchief and set it aside. “One doesn’t dare cry in public school. All the fellows will make his life miserable if he does.”

They made the first formers’ lives miserable in any case.

She stirred around in her blankets until, after a sharp little elbow had dug into his ribs, she was budged against Tye’s side. “But you got to go and see things, you got to do more than collect eggs and ramble to the burn, and wait for your uncles to come visit.”

“I got to memorize more useless Latin than most children know English. I got my eyes blacked by the older boys. I was punished for things they did, and I missed my bro—”

“You missed my papa. I miss him too.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to say that she couldn’t possibly miss a man she’d never met, but Tye was beginning to get the knack of being not just an uncle, but her uncle.

“It’s all right to miss him, Fiona. He would have loved to have known you.”

“Mama says he was handsome.”

This observation held a plea.

“He was damned good looking, and you are not to tattle on me for swearing. I’m stating a simple truth.”

“Uncle Ian says it’s not swearing to call them the damned English or the damned taxes. What did my father look like?”

The same queer feeling he’d experienced out riding with her washed over him again. He knew what his father looked like. He knew what Quinworth sounded like, knew the scent of his cigars, the way he studied his wineglass while the blessing was said over the evening meal.

Fiona knew none of these things regarding her progenitor, and that was arguably Tye’s fault.

“I have a picture of him with me. I’ll show it to you in the morning.”

She bolted to a sitting position. “You have a painting of my papa? I want to see it now. I’ve never seen a picture of him. Does he look like me?”

She was scrambling across Tye as she spoke, digging knees into his shins and bringing to mind more swearing.

“It’s the middle of the night, child. This can wait until morning.”

“He’s my papa. I want to see him now.”

She stood there in her nightgown, a thick red braid coming undone over each shoulder, impending hysterics framing every line of her form. Her lips trembled with it, her shoulders quivered, and her tightly clenched little fists promised a great, noisy outburst in the very next instant.

“Come along then.” He rose off the bed and took her by the hand. “And don’t be complaining to me if you catch your very death, running about at all hours without your slippers.”

“My slippers are under the bed.” She wrenched free of his grasp, darted forth, and held them up.

“Give those to me.” He snatched them from her and knelt to put them on her feet. “You will return to bed when I’ve shown you the portrait, do you understand?”

“Yes, Uncle Tye.” She seized his hand and dragged him toward the door. “I’ll go right to bed, and I won’t bother you again tonight. I won’t bother anybody. In the morning, may I see the picture again?”

She didn’t require an answer. The entire length of the house, she blathered on about her good-looking, handsome papa, who was a brave soldier for Her Majesty and danced so very wonderfully at the regimental ball that Mama let him kiss her, and then they got married.

Kiss, indeed. But at least Fiona’s mother hadn’t burdened the child with less attractive truths—not yet.

Quinworth might not be so careful of the child’s sensibilities regarding his view of her mother. Tye paused outside his door and looked down at Fiona where she smiled up at him. Trust shone out of her eyes, trust and hope and all manner of things that had Tye dropping her hand and pushing the door open.

“The portrait is in my traveling satchel. Are your hands clean?”

“I took my bath. Aunt Hester would skin me alive if I got my sheets dirty because I skipped my bath.”

Aunt Hester would pat the girl on the head and murmur the mildest reproach. Tye rummaged in his bag and withdrew three small framed pictures. He passed the first one to her. “That’s your papa.”

She snatched it up and brought it to her face. “Why isn’t he smiling?”

“His eyes are smiling, but to have a photograph made, one must sit still for a very long time, and facial expressions are discouraged as a result.”

“You can’t move at all?”

“If you do, it makes the image blurry. I think you can see a resemblance between you and your papa, around the chin and jaw.”

She padded over to his dressing stand and peered at herself in the mirror, then back at the image of her