Ruth McGinley

The daughter of Irish farmers, Ruth McGinley was raised to be a subservient wife who would produce a brood of healthy children. Her family fell upon hard times and married her off at the age of 15 to have one less mouth to feed. Her husband was an abusive drunk who took out all his frustration at his family’s poverty on Ruth. One day, after years of abuse, Ruth snapped. Her husband came home drunk, intent on dealing Ruth her daily drubbing. This time, she fought back and cracked open his skull with a rolling pin. She’d never meant to kill him, and her grief and fear led her to run away to England. After several months on the streets of London, she mugged a wealthy solicitor and bought passage to America with the money. Determined to start a new life on her own terms, Ruth landed in Virginia, penniless and with nowhere to go. She hired herself out doing menial housework, but her refusal to submit to the drudgery of daily life got the best of her. After a passing insult from her employer at dinner one night, she dumped a tureen of hot soup in his lap. Her employer’s dinner guest found this amusing to no end; little did she know that the guest was a Malkavian who saw her act as a moment of CHAPTER TWO 65 brilliance. The estate’s master had Ruth arrested, but before she went to trial the guest appeared and took her away from both jail and her life. Ruth traveled with her sire for several years until she succumbed to the lure of the American frontier. She moved westward with the Manifest Destiny, always looking for a place where she could continue her unlife as she wished. Eventually, she ended up in Texas and established a haven. Ruth realized she needed a cover for her nocturnal existence. She found being an outlaw was both a dangerous thrill and a disguise. The unlife of a gunslinger suited Ruth perfectly. Her vampiric powers made her one of the deadliest, and due to her gender, people constantly underestimated her. She could fight, curse and gamble with the best of them. Eventually, however, she found herself on the wrong end of a pack of Lupines, and it landed her in torpor. When she awakened in the 1920s, the world was a vastly different place. The Texas oil boom was in full swing, and the old frontier was gone. Again, Ruth made the best of it. She saw the young prospectors and oil barons as the new generation of hustlers and gamblers, and she attached herself to several of them. In a series of guises, she became the “other woman” of some of Texas’ most influential oil magnates as well as a governor or two. Even the coming of greater numbers of Kindred didn’t seem to bother her. Ruth entrenched herself in Texas politics not because of a lust for power, but because of an absolute need to control her destiny. She undermined anything or anyone who sought to control her, turning the law or the Church on anybody who crossed her. She became known among Dallas’ Kindred, and eventually became a primogen by sheer age and formidability. The ever-present encroachment of the Sabbat from Mexico worries Ruth. She sees them as a threat to her control. Determined to turn the mongrels back to their covens, she occasionally even gets out her old pistols and leads hunting parties across northern Texas. Ruth doesn’t particularly care about the Camarilla, though she believes it to be a damn sight better than finding ignominious Final Death among the brutish packs of the Sabbat.

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