Page 19 of Somewhere Along The Way (Mackinnon #3)

Chapter Seven

Ross Mackinnon went to the Duke of Dunford’s ball.

But he didn’t wear the kilt.

Half an hour before he was supposed to be downstairs, Ross was standing in his room thinking this had to be the worst day of his life.

He was wishing he could back up and start the day all over when he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror.

It was enough to make his reflection throw up.

He couldn’t believe the man who looked back was him.

He took a step closer. The eyes were his.

And the mouth, too. Come to think of it, the hands looked a lot like his. But that was about it.

In Ross’ opinion the rest of him was pure stranger.

Who would’ve thought it? Here he was, Ross Mackinnon, a man who could out-fight, out-drink, out-ride, and maybe even out-whore half the men in Texas, and what was he doing?

Standing here in a black tailcoat, white waistcoat, and small-bowed cravat, looking as if he was trying to be something he was not, and feeling as lost as a short dog in tall grass.

Most of his thoughts were colorful, descriptive words, words that reflected his uneasiness, words that expressed his irritation over being forced to make a fool of himself by what Percy termed “the enrichment of his social graces”.

Damnation. It’s one thing to make a fool of myself. Quite another to dress up like one while I’m doing it.

“Just what the well-groomed gentlemen of France are wearing this season,” he said aloud, mimicking what that sap Douglas had said earlier. As if Ross gave a hoot about what the well-groomed gentlemen of France were wearing this season—or any other season, for that matter.

He eyed the formal evening attire, knowing clothes like this, on a man like him, stuck out like socks on a rooster.

One thing he had always prided himself on—he never tried to be something he wasn’t.

Wearing all this black and white—well, it looked to him as if he was doing his best to look like a skunk, and it was beyond him why anybody would want to dress up like an animal—any animal.

He had to admit he’d seen stranger things.

Still, if a body wanted to look like an animal, there were plenty of other animals he would have picked.

He poked a finger between the tight, stiff collar and his neck and gave it a yank. This rigging was uncomfortable as the devil. A man couldn’t move properly, all harnessed up like this.

He thought about his brothers and imagined the looks on their faces if they could see him now. The thought brought a stab of homesickness, but he told himself again that he had done the right thing by coming here.

He told himself something else too. Mackinnon, if you had a lick of sense you’d put your buckskin breeches and cambric shirt back on and go to this fancy shindig that way.

But he had given his word. And if anything had been drummed into Ross’ head since coming here, it was that a Mackinnon never went back on his word.

He adjusted the coat, thinking at least he had stuck to his guns about wearing the kilt. Odd name, kilt. Where did the name come from? He grinned. Maybe they call it a kilt because a man’s liable to get himself kilt by going out in public wearing one.

All this thinking about the Scots’ native dress made him realize one thing. Compared to wearing a kilt, this skunk’s-suit attire didn’t seem all that bad. Things could have been worse.

“They could be one helluva lot better, too,” he mumbled. He wasn’t exactly looking forward to going anywhere dressed like this. It made him feel worse than a treed coon. It didn’t help any to know everyone would be dressed this way as well. The people downstairs were all used to dressing like this.

Ross was not.

The people downstairs all felt comfortable in these clothes.

Ross did not.

And it wouldn’t take any one of them very long to recognize that fact. He was setting himself up for ridicule, and if Ross Mackinnon had one sensitive bone in his body, it was fear of being made fun of.

His reaction might have been a lot less violent perhaps, if a painful reminder from Ross’ past hadn’t suddenly popped to the surface and burst like a tiny air bubble in the back of his mind.

A moment later, the bitter taste of a memory rose like the burn of gall in his throat and he recalled the old pain.

The pain of what it was like to be ridiculed.

He had grown up poor. “Poor as piss and potato peelings,” as the postmaster in Groesbeck used to say whenever Ross and his brothers came into town.

Being poor meant a lot of things, but one thing Ross remembered most of all was it meant wearing the hand-me-downs left over from his two older brothers.

By the time anything made its way down to Ross from Nicholas and Tavis it was past worn.

He felt the old familiar tension inch its way up his neck.

The memory of the jeering he had taken was something he had never been able to forget—at least not completely.

Even now, the way he had been teased by the other kids’ making sport of his clothes—it still rankled.

Well he could remember the sneers, the jokes, the misery that always came whenever the boys at school gathered to poke fun at him.

Sometimes he wondered why he had taken it all, why he hadn’t turned tail and run, or simply given up.

But that would have meant quitting school and letting everyone know he had been bested, and there was something about quitting or being beaten at anything that had never sat well with him—or any of the Mackinnon boys, for that matter.

And Ross had never been one to ask his brothers to fight his battles for him.

Nicholas and Tavis, the two oldest, had their own battles to fight, and this prompted Ross to keep his troubles to himself.

In spite of the years that had passed, he could still recall the metallic flavor of fear, the sick feeling of wanting to hide, to run away—and just how close he had come to doing just that.

How different his life might have been if he hadn’t learned one hot Texas afternoon that there was yet another way.

After one particularly painful ribbing from his schoolmates during recess, he left school, heading on down to the river to nurse his wounds.

By the time his teacher rang the bell for school to resume, Ross was skipping stones across the river’s glassy surface.

The next morning he was invited up to the teacher’s platform, where Miss Lori Pettigrew asked him to speak to her at the end of the school day.

For the rest of the afternoon he stared at the heads of the pupils in front of him; he wasn’t even tempted to dip the curl at the end of Pearline Howser’s fat braid into the inkwell on his desk.

When school was out, Ross found himself standing before Miss Pettigrew’s desk after the other pupils had left for the day. He could still remember the feel of the smooth planks beneath his foot as he raked the floor with the side of his bare foot.

His mind wasn’t so much upon the scolding he was going to receive from Miss Pettigrew but on the torment he would get from the boys waiting for him once he left there and headed for home.

“Ross Mackinnon,” Miss Pettigrew had said, “I am concerned about you.”

Ross swallowed hard. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you know why I’m concerned?”

Ross had felt a bit sheepish, standing on this foot and that, his hands thrust deep into his pockets. “I…I’m not sure,” he mumbled, rubbing the other foot across the floor.

“Speak up, Ross. I can’t understand you when you don’t articulate.”

“No, ma’am. I don’t know why you’re mad at me.”

Miss Pettigrew’s face softened. “I never said I was mad at you. I said I was concerned. I’m concerned because you aren’t doing your schoolwork as well as you used to, because you skipped school yesterday, and you don’t seem to be getting along with the other boys.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t you have anything to say besides ‘yes, ma’am’?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t reckon I do.”

Miss Pettigrew sighed. “That won’t do, Ross. I won’t accept insolence from you. I want to know why you are suddenly having so much trouble at school.”

“I reckon it’s because of my clothes.”

Miss Pettigrew looked astounded. “Your clothes? What has that to do with your problems at school?”

Ross remembered how he went on to tell Miss Pettigrew about his ragged clothes and how they caused the other boys to poke fun at him and call him “Raggedy Ross”, or “Hand-me-down Mackinnon”.

He had been ready to receive the business end of Miss Pettigrew’s hickory stick for admitting such a thing, when the strangest thing happened.

Instead of giving him a stern lecture, or even a taste of her hickory stick, Miss Pettigrew said, “No wonder you aren’t doing well.”

And then Miss Pettigrew went on to do something that endeared her to Ross forever. She came around that desk like a cyclone in a hurry, grabbing Ross by the hand and pulling him behind her so fast two tortoise shell pins popped from her bun and one of Ross’ suspenders came unhooked.

Ross let the suspender be, but he picked up Miss Pettigrew’s pins and handed them to her, watching as she poked them in her pocket, not missing a step as she did.

Out of the schoolhouse they went, and out of the schoolyard too, that knot of hair at the back of Miss Pettigrew’s head bouncing this way and that, then walking a few more yards into the middle of the road, just beyond the fence that bordered the schoolyard, where she suddenly stopped.

Releasing Ross’ hand, she turned to him.