The Lewis Man

THIRTY

It was milder in Edinburgh, a light wind blowing in off the Pentland Hills, the sun dipping in and out from behind bubbles of cumulus, splashing light and colour across this grey city of granite and sandstone.

They had brought overnight bags in case of the need to stay, although Fin was not optimistic that they would find anything other than the places of which Marsaili’s father had spoken. A visit that would take them less than an hour. They took a taxi from the airport, and as it approached Haymarket the driver set his indicator going for a left turn into Magdala Crescent. Fin said to him, ‘Not this way.’

‘It’s a short-cut, mate.’

‘I don’t care. Go up to Palmerston Place.’

The driver shrugged. ‘You’re paying.’

Fin felt Marsaili’s eyes on him. Without meeting them he said, ‘When Padraig MacBean took me out to An Sgeir on his old trawler, he told me the story of how he’d lost his father’s brand-new boat in the Minch. Barely escaped with his life.’ He turned to see her eyes fixed upon him, wide with curiosity. ‘Even though there is nothing to mark the spot where she went down, Padraig said he feels it every time he sails over it.’

‘Your son was killed in Magdala Crescent?’

‘In a street off it.’

‘Do you want to tell me about it?

He gazed past the driver, through the windscreen and the traffic stretching ahead of them along West Maitland Street. Finally he said, ‘No. I don’t think I do.’

The taxi turned into Palmerston Place, past smoke-blackened bay-windowed tenements, a park in early spring leaf, the Gothic grandeur of St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, and down the hill to where the red-sandstone church on the corner had been converted to a youth hostel with pillar-box red doors.

It swung up the hill, then, on Belford Road, to drop them in the forecourt of a Travelodge hotel opposite a stone gateway beneath a blue-and-white banner fluttering in the breeze.

‘Dean Gallery,’ Marsaili read when they stepped out of the cab. Fin paid the driver and turned to face her confusion. ‘The Dean is an art gallery?’

Fin nodded. ‘It is now.’ He took her arm and they ran across the road between cars. Through a black, wrought-iron gate they followed a narrow cobbled path up the hill between a high privet hedge and a stone wall. The path opened up then, and curved its way through parkland shaded by tall chestnuts, where bronze statues stood on stone plinths planted on manicured lawns. ‘In the days before the welfare state,’ he said, ‘there was something in Scotland called the Poor Law. It was a kind of social security for the poorest in society, pretty much paid for by the Church. And where there were gaps, sometimes private charities stepped in. The Orphan Hospital of Edinburgh was set up in the early 1700s by the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge to fill one of those gaps.’

‘This is what you were looking up on the internet last night?’

‘Yes.’ They passed a tarnished sculpture of the Madonna and Child called The Virgin of Alsace. ‘In 1833 the hospital moved into a new building, here on the Dean Estate, and it became known as the Dean Orphanage.’ An Edinburgh lady of indeterminate age with bob-cut silver hair and navy-blue skirts hurried by with a whiff of floral scent that reminded Fin briefly of Marsaili’s mother.

As they rounded the bend at the top of the hill, The Dean swung into view in all its towering sandstone grandeur: porticos, arched windows, four-cornered towers and stone balustrades. Fin and Marsaili stopped to take it in. There was an odd sense of destiny in finding it here at the top of the hill, hidden behind hedges and trees, revealing itself suddenly like a glimpse into history, national and personal. The circle of fate whose first curve had begun with the departure of Marsaili’s father was completed now by her arrival.

Her voice was hushed by awe. ‘This was an orphanage?’

‘Apparently.’

‘My God. It’s a wonderful building, Fin. But no place to bring up orphaned children.’

Fin thought that his aunt’s house had been no place to bring up an orphaned child either. He said, ‘I read last night that originally they were fed on porridge and kale, and that the orphan girls had to make clothes for all the children to wear. I guess things would have been very different in the fifties.’ He paused. ‘But it’s hard to picture your dad here.’

Marsaili turned to him. ‘Are you sure this is where he meant?’

He led her a little further up the hill, and pointed beyond The Dean, to the twin towers of another impressive building in the valley below. ‘Stewart’s Melville,’ he said. ‘A private school. In the days your dad would have been here it was called Daniel Stewart’s College.’

‘Danny’s place.’

Fin nodded. ‘A terrible irony in it, not missed by your dad. The poorest and most deprived children of his generation living cheek by jowl with the most privileged. What was it he said? The turrets at Danny’s had always been a reminder of their place in the world?’

‘Yes,’ Marsaili said. ‘At the bottom of the pile.’ She turned to Fin. ‘I want to go in.’

They followed the drive to the portico at the entrance, where steps led up between pillars to a rust-red door. A stone stairway to their left descended to an open green space that might once have been gardens. Fin watched Marsaili’s face as they crossed a tiled vestibule into the main hallway that ran the length of the building. Impressively grand rooms led off either side of it, galleries hung with paintings, or filled with sculptures, a shop, a cafeteria. Light cascaded down at either end of it from windows in the stairwells of each wing. You could very nearly hear the distant echo of lost children.

The emotion in Marsaili’s face was almost painful to watch as she reassessed everything about herself. Who she was, where she had come from, what dreadful kind of a life her father had endured as a boy. Something he had never shared with any of them. His lonely secret.

A uniformed security guard asked if he could help them.

Fin said, ‘This place used to be an orphanage.’

‘Yeah. Hard to believe.’ The guard tipped his head towards one end of the corridor. ‘The boys used to be in that wing, apparently. The girls in the other. The exhibition room along there on the left used to be the headmaster’s office. Or whatever he was called.’

‘I want to go,’ Marsaili said suddenly, and Fin saw that there were silent tears reflecting light on her cheeks. He slipped his arm through hers and led her back out through the entrance, watched by a bemused guard wondering what it was he had said. She stood breathing deeply at the top of the steps for almost a minute. ‘We can find out from the records, can’t we? Who he really was, I mean. Where his family came from.’

Fin shook his head. ‘I checked online last night. The records are kept locked up for a hundred years. Only the children themselves have a right of access to them.’ He shrugged. ‘I guess it’s designed to protect them. Though I suppose the courts could grant the police a warrant to gain access. This is a murder investigation, after all.’

She turned teary eyes in his direction, wiping her cheeks dry with the backs of her hands. He saw in her face the same question he had been unable to answer on the beach the night before. Had her father killed his brother? Fin thought it unlikely they would ever know, unless by some miracle they were able to find the girl called Ceit, who had boarded at the O’Henley croft.

They walked in silence back down the cobbled path to Belford Road, the Dean Cemetery brooding in shaded tranquillity behind a high stone wall. As they arrived at the gate Fin’s mobile phone alerted him to an incoming email. He scrolled through its menu with his finger and tapped to open it. When he took some time to read it, frowning thoughtfully, Marsaili said, ‘Something important?’

He waited until he had tapped in a response before replying. ‘When I was looking for references to the Dean Orphanage on the internet last night I came across a forum of former Dean orphans exchanging photographs and reminiscences. I suppose there must be some kind of bond between them all that they still feel, even if they didn’t know one another at The Dean.’

‘Like family.’

He looked at her. ‘Yes. Like the family they never had. You still feel a greater affinity to a second cousin you’ve never met than to some complete stranger.’ He pushed his hands deep into his pockets. ‘A lot of them seem to have emigrated. Australia the most popular destination.’

‘As far away from The Dean as they could get.’

‘A fresh start, I suppose. Putting a whole world between you and your childhood. Erasing the past.’ Every word he uttered had such resonance for Fin that he found himself almost too choked to speak. It was, after all, only what he had done himself. He felt Marsaili’s hand on his arm. The merest touch that said more than anything she could have put into words. ‘Anyway, there was one of them still living here in Edinburgh. A man called Tommy Jack. He might well have been at The Dean around the same time as your dad. There was an email address. I wrote to him.’ He shrugged. ‘I very nearly didn’t. It was a real afterthought.’

‘That was him replying?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘He sent his address and said he would be happy to talk to us this evening at his home.’