From the Desk of Ruby A. McTavish
March 24, 2013
In my last letter, I said I didn’t want to talk about Hugh Woodward because he was so damn boring. And now we’ve come to the least boring man I ever met, Andrew Miller.
I don’t want to talk about him, either, but for different reasons. Sadder ones.
I married Duke out of lust, and Hugh out of obligation, but Andrew? Andrew, I married for love.
And he loved me, too. I think you can see it in the portrait he painted of me, the one that hangs over the stairs at Ashby House. It was a bit of a scandal at the time, that portrait. My hair down and loose, the hint of bare feet underneath that Dior gown, that smile on my face.
Of course, I myself was a bit of a scandal by then. While I’d taken great care to ensure that Hugh’s death was a true accident, it seems you really cannot lose two husbands prematurely without people beginning to whisper. And not just strangers. I could have handled that.
No, it was the way I sometimes caught Daddy looking at me, his eyes dark and sad—so sad—and the way Nelle’s mouth seemed to draw in tighter whenever I entered a room.
She and Alan were having a rough go of it by then. He’d been sleeping with Violet, Daddy’s secretary, and despite Nelle’s insistence that she’d fill the halls of Ashby House with babies, there was only Howell, a little boy with her light hair, Alan’s round face, and my father’s temper.
So, as you can imagine, the time had seemed right to take myself abroad for a bit.
Paris was out, naturally, but I decided that I’d like to see the other great cities of Europe that Duke had deprived me of. So I spent a few weeks in Rome, then on to Milan. I’d thought about Madrid next, maybe Barcelona, but then I got an invitation to visit one of my old friends from Agnes Scott, Betty-Ruth. She’d done quite well for herself, marrying a Scottish laird and settling into some medieval fortress in the Highlands, so when she suggested I come stay with them while I was overseas, I leapt at the chance.
A thing about castles: they’re actually terribly drafty and cold, and the hallways from the kitchens are so long that by the time food reaches the table, it’s barely lukewarm.
My first night there, Betty-Ruth’s husband, Hamish, had poured me a generous draft of whiskey and said, “How does it feel to be home?”
I’d been shivering in an uncomfortable armchair that smelled like horses, and I’d looked at him, puzzled. “Home?”
“Aye,” he’d said, nodding toward the windows. “Yer a McTavish. They come from not far from here. Just the next glen over.”
I had known that my ancestors came from Scotland. Daddy was very proud of that fact, and I’d felt a familiar tug of grief as I thought about how much he would have loved to be here. He had died not long after Hugh, and that was another reason I’d decided to travel, hoping to shake off some of the sadness that had begun to settle over Ashby House.
And so, for Daddy, every morning I put on the ugliest jacket and a pair of Wellingtons, and tried to summon up the appropriate amount of familial pride as I strode around the grounds of Hamish’s castle. I came from these hills, I would tell myself, waiting to feel some sort of tug, some remembered past deep in my blood.
I must’ve walked for miles every day, looking for some sign that my ancestors had once called this place home.
All I felt was cold. And vaguely damp.
This is the part where I should tell you that even before I came to Scotland, sometime around Hugh’s death, my thoughts had begun to turn, more and more frequently, to that old fear of mine.
That I was not Ruby McTavish at all, but Dora Darnell, stolen from her poor family and raised in the lap of luxury. That the real Ruby McTavish’s bones were somewhere in the forests surrounding Ashby House, and that everything that was wrong with me—because once you’ve killed two men, you really must begin to suspect you’re not quite right—was because I came from some other, cursed bloodline.
Sometimes, I thought it might be a relief to find out that was the case. Maybe it would explain why, when Hugh had begun to grate on me so, my mind had immediately gone to his death.
Now, I know that nature versus nurture is a subject that fascinates people these days, but I was a rich woman from North Carolina in the 1960s. Our kind didn’t exactly stay current on the latest psychological research.
So I only had my own thoughts to consult, and those thoughts were growing increasingly loud when I met Andrew Miller.
He was already fairly well known as a painter then, popular for his relaxed, natural portraits of various aristocrats, and when Hamish mentioned he was coming to stay, I was curious to meet him. I’d never met an artist before, and yes, I was already thinking it might be nice to have him paint my picture.