Kitty MacKay

Summary

Amid the wind-scoured heather of the Highlands, a foundling christened Kitty MacKay is reared as a living reproach by a miserly aunt and uncle who treat her like an interloper in their peat-smelling bothy. Salvation arrives in the spectral form of Lord Inglehart, a patrician whose carriage wheels churn the glen’s mist as he whisks the child to the amber-lit drawing rooms of Sussex. There, under coffered ceilings and amid the hush of inherited portraits, Kitty blooms into a sylph-like presence who quietly magnetizes the young heir, David. Their courtship—an embroidery of furtive glances across libraries lined with calf-spined volumes—shatters when a dusty letter reveals that David is reportedly her half-brother, the fruit of his father’s long-suppressed indiscretion. Horror-struck, David spurns her; Kitty, now doubly orphaned by circumstance, trudges northward to resume her servitude among the kailyards. Fate pivots when the uncle’s fevered deathbed confession spills: the true Inglehart infant perished in infancy; Kitty, a cuckoo slipped into the nest to keep the allowance flowing, bears no blood tie to David. The lovers, scarred but unbroken, reunite as winter’s first snow silences the crags, their future child already quickening beneath the tartan shawl that once swaddled a nameless foundling.

Synopsis

Sweet Kitty suffers the cruelty of her adopted aunt and uncle in Scotland, until taken to England by her guardian, Lord Inglehart, where she falls in love with his son. Learning that through a former escapade of his father the girl is his sister, the boy denies her love and she returns sadly to Scotland and slavery, only to have it all explained when her uncle is taken ill and confesses that the real daughter of Lord Inglehart died and she, Kitty, was adopted in her place to secure allowance from his Lordship. David and Kitty let us draw a veil. the man she still loved, the father of her babe, had been redeemed.