Entry Island

CHAPTER FORTY

Sime was in shock. Tears bubbled up quite involuntarily and blurred his ancestor’s handwriting.

He’d had no recollection, from his grandmother’s reading of the diaries, of Ciorstaidh giving Simon a ring in Glasgow, or of his ancestor parting with it on Grosse Île to help pay for the baby’s keep. As Annie had said, if he’d known how the story completed a circle, that the ring had come back to him in the end, then its significance would surely never have been lost to his memory.

He looked at his hand in front of him on the desk, that very ring shining in the light. He ran the tip of a finger lightly over the engraving of the arm and sword. How could he ever have imagined what history this simple inanimate object had witnessed? How carelessly had he worn it all these years without the least idea of its significance?

He stood up and crossed to the bed and sat down to open and search back through the diaries until he found what he was looking for. And there it was, finally. His ancestor’s account of losing Ciorstaidh on the quay, just as he had dreamt it. Except for the gift of the ring she had given him in the moments before their separation. A family heirloom that she had taken in case they needed something to sell. Part of a matching set, including a pendant that hung around her neck.

He searched through the following journals until he found the moment on Grosse Île when his ancestor had given the Mackinnons the ring. Almost as an afterthought. Guilty that the sacrifice had been Michaél’s and not his. Sime had not remembered that at all. Then, as he flicked through the pages in front of him, he realised that they were full of detail he did not recall from his granny’s reading. Maybe she had paraphrased or edited as she had read. And he knew that someday soon he was going to have to sit down and read them all through from beginning to end. After all, this was his story, too. His history.

Suddenly it occurred to him that he had no idea what had happened to Michaél. Was that the story his parents had not wanted their grandmother to read them? But he would look for it later. There were just two short entries left in the final diary, and he took it back to the desk to settle down in the pool of light and read them.