Frances
On the train to the countryside, on the way to visit the country estate that was Alex's boyhood home, Danny stared out the window. At Scottie's place, he'd finally fallen into the comfort of the deep, fathomless sleep that had eluded him for so long, and he was beginning to feel much better, rested.
He'd not liked her at first, Alex's adoptive mother. She was abrasive and untrusting; distant. It was only later that he realized how much he admired her quiet fierceness, and that it was she, of them all, who was the one who would have the strength, social connections and the wherewithal to not only to cultivate Alex's talents and intellect as a young boy, but to protect him and ultimately find out what had happened to her son. She would have made a better spy than her husband, and being relegated to the background planning cocktail and dinner parties simply because she was a woman certainly would have left a bitter taste. Alex's biological mother was only through accident of birth, and she couldn't give him what Frances and Charles could, except for love, which Frances had said was overrated; although she had taken the young family into her home. Frances and Danny actually had more in common than he would have originally thought, since they both loved Alex.
"Beautiful countryside you have here." he told her, trying to make conversation as the vehicle bumped along the country roads, but it truly was beautiful.
Tall and elegantly slender, she had picked him up at the railway station in a Land Rover wearing jeans and a heavy roll-neck jumper and quilted vest, and Wellington boots, as if she had just come from working in her beloved gardens.