The Winter Sea

CHAPTER 18

THERE WAS NO STATION at Kirkcudbright, so I took the train to Dumfries, which was close. I didn’t know what I expected, when I stepped down to the platform. An epiphany, I guess—a sort of wakening of memory now that I was in the landscape where Sophia had been born and raised. But there was nothing. Just the pretty little station with its curving track and platform and the sunshine sparkling down through the glass roof that stretched above me.

The weather was thawing in earnest, and the breeze was almost mild against my face as I stepped back to let another woman pass me, her wheeled suitcase rumbling purposefully across the paving bricks

‘Carrie!’

I shifted the weight of my own case and took a look round. I’d never actually met Ross McClelland, but over the years I’d formed a mental picture of him, making him in my own mind an older version of my father, someone I’d recognize, seeing as we had all sprung from the same stock. The man who came forward to greet me was nothing like what I’d imagined he’d be. He was big and tall and ruddy-faced, with thick wavy hair and a beard that, though grey, still showed black round the edges. I wouldn’t have known him for family.

He’d recognized me, though.

‘Oh, aye, my wife buys all your books,’ he said. ‘You look just like your photo on the jacket flap. Is this all you brought?’

‘Yes. How is your wife?’ I asked him, as he took my suitcase from my hand and led me out towards the parking area.

‘A wee bit better. It’s her gout, you see. She has attacks of it so fierce these days she finds it hard to move, but she’s been out of bed this morning and her sister’s come to sit with her awhile, so that’s all right.’

I hadn’t taken Ross up on his offer of a place to stay. I’d known that he would offer when I phoned him up last Sunday, but I’d also known his wife had not been well, and that they didn’t need the added burden of a house guest—especially one who would be staying up till all hours writing, wandering round when everybody else was fast asleep, and lying late in bed. So I had booked myself a room at a hotel, and although Ross had raised a protest, I had sensed he was relieved.

Just as I sensed now, from the way that he was chatting to me while he put my suitcase in the car and saw me safely buckled in, that he was pleased to have the chance to leave his nursemaid duties for a day, and spend a bit of time with someone else who shared his love of genealogy.

He’d promised me a proper tour, and that was what I got.

It was a lovely drive from Dumfries, down through countryside that rolled with hills of green and darker forests, and the trees in places arching overhead to make the road seem like a tunnel. There were sheep, and curiously banded black-and-white Galloway cattle, and when we made our first stop at a little country kirkyard we were greeted by a lively burst of birdsong.

‘There you are,’ said Ross, and pointed to a small and tilting headstone. ‘That’s your Anna Mary Paterson.’

I knelt to take a closer look. The stone was crusted thick with lichen, and the passing years had worn the words away till they were barely there at all.

Ross said, ‘It was a bit of luck, my finding that. You don’t find many stones that age, and those you do find often are past reading.’

He was right, I knew. But still, I had a feeling that I might have found this grave myself, if I had tried. The kirkyard faintly stirred my memory. Standing up again, I looked across the fields and saw a dark place near the distant trees that made me feel as cold as if I’d stepped into a shadow. ‘Did there used to be a house once, over there?’

Ross couldn’t tell me, but I felt sure that if I ever had the luck to come across an old map of this area, I’d find a cottage sitting on that spot—John Drummond’s cottage. It was fitting, in my mind, that time had claimed those stones as well, and left no mark behind of all the evil that had happened there.

I touched Sophia’s sister’s headstone gently, and felt closure.

Our next stop was a field as well. ‘See over there?’ asked Ross, and pointed to a level place along the river shore. ‘Your ancestor and mine, old Hugh Maclellan, had a farm there. That was where his sons were born and where he died, before they both were sent across to live in Ireland among the Ulster Scots.’

I knew the story. David John McClelland—when and why they’d changed the spelling of the name, we didn’t know—had gone to Ireland with his brother William, and we’d lost their trails until they’d both returned to marry wives in Scotland. William had found his wife first, and in what must have been a disappointment to the Scottish settlers in Ireland, had stayed on in Kirkcudbright. Not for long, though. He had died a young man, leaving only one son to survive him and to carry on the family line that Ross became a part of.

‘Would you like to see the house that William lived in, after he came back from Ireland?’

It wasn’t my branch of the family tree, but Ross seemed so pleased to have me there for company that I said yes, of course I would, and so we drove the short way down into Kirkcudbright.

It was one of the prettiest places I’d been to, its houses built shoulder to shoulder and painted soft yellow and grey, pink and blue—some whitewashed, some left plain of red stone or of dark stone, with their neatly painted window frames and tidy iron railings and the chimneys with their little rows of chimney pots.

The High Street was unusual in that it was an L-shape and, though I could see a few shops and commercial establishments, it seemed to otherwise be almost all residential.

‘Aye, it’s always been like that,’ said Ross. He drove us past the ancient Tollbooth with its pointed high roof tower, round the corner where the narrow street grew narrower from all the cars parked end to end along it, and he found a space to park his car among them, and we both got out.

The house in question was a stone-built, square-walled building huddled close against its neighbors, with a bright green-painted door and windows that were open to the warming air of spring.

Ross looked it over. ‘Now, I can’t be certain, mind you, but from letters that I’ve found describing where his house was situated, this is where I think he lived. A shame you didn’t come here last year, I’d have taken you inside—it was a bed and breakfast then. But it’s been bought up by a lad from Glasgow. Artist. Lots of artists live here now.’

I stopped. A breeze blew past, and something stirred. Enough to make me take my camera out, and snap off a few pictures of the street, the door, the windows…that far window, in particular. I said, to Ross, ‘I’m guessing David McClelland was here, too, at one time.’

‘Aye, it’s possible.’

It was a little more than that, I thought. And it was one of my regrets that, in the moment before Ross resumed our tour, I didn’t just step up and knock at that green door and ask the artist lad from Glasgow for a tour of his front rooms, and of the room in the far corner where the window seemed to watch me like a gently knowing eye.

I was restless that night.

I had wanted to treat Ross to supper, to thank him for taking me round, but he’d cheerfully waved off my offer. ‘No, no, there’s no need for that. The wife’s sister will be watching the door as it is, I’ve been gone so long. But,’ he’d said, ‘it was a pleasure, my dear, to have met you.’

Our handshake had easily turned to a hug.

‘Oh,’ he’d said, drawing back so he could search his coat pockets, ‘I nearly forgot. I was meaning to give you a catalogue.’

‘Catalogue?’

‘Aye, for the auction. I’ve sent one last week to your father, but I thought you might like to have one yourself. It’s the New York McClellands,’ he’d said. ‘Tom and Clare.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Tom was my Dad’s distant cousin, and traced his line back, as did we, to Sophia and David. Somehow or other his side of the family had managed to gain possession of most of the family’s historical keepsakes—our family Bible being the only notable exception—and Tom and his wife had a habit of blithely disposing of things to help fund their extravagant lifestyle, which left my dad fuming since often we didn’t find out until after the sale.

I’d looked at the catalogue cover to see what the date of the auction was—next Friday—and Ross had said, ‘Oh aye, I got that away in the post to your father as soon as I opened the envelope. Tom’s done this so many times now I’ve had to get one step ahead of him, so I set up an arrangement,’ he’d said, ‘with the auction house. Any time they take in something to do with McClellands, they send me their catalogues.’

‘Clever.’ I’d smiled. ‘I’m surprised Tom and Clare still have things left to sell. I’d have thought they’d cleared everything out by now.’

‘Oh, there’s not much this time. Only a table or two and some jewelry. But still, I thought you and your father would like to at least see the pictures.’

I’d thanked him, and tucked it away in my bag.

After supper, I’d gone for a walk and had sat for an hour on a bench at the back of the Greyfriars Church by the harbor. It wasn’t the kind of a harbor I’d thought it would be, after all that I’d read in the history books. Centuries ago the great Scottish patriot William Wallace had supposedly sailed from here after his failure at Falkirk, fleeing to the safety of the continent, and his arch-nemesis, the English King Edward I, had once landed his fleet of some sixty-odd ships in Kirkcudbright, so in my own mind I had pictured a harbor like those of the towns on the coast, but this hadn’t been like that. There had been little more than the river itself, with a wall at its edge where the boats could be moored. And at low tide those boats would be sitting on mudbanks, and anything larger would have to wait out in the river’s deep middle, at anchor.

But still, when I’d squinted, I hadn’t had trouble imagining ships sailing past, coming in from the sea to seek shelter and unload their cargoes. The town would have changed since that time. The power plant off to my right and the bridge arching over the bend in the river would not have been there, but when I’d filtered out all that, I’d felt I might be seeing what Sophia would have seen had she been sitting in that spot beneath the trees three hundred years ago, and looking out across the River Dee. The farther shore was still and peaceful, with its green hills rising gently through the deeper green of woods above a white farm and a small boat sailing past upon the tide.

I hadn’t been so certain of the church behind me—Ross had told me it had been rebuilt at some time in the eighteenth century, and was not the original—but I’d been sure the castle that stood even taller behind that was something that Sophia would have known. MacLellan’s Castle, named for my own family, though we hadn’t yet established any link on paper between our McClellands and the man who’d built the castle. It had suffered, as had Slains, the great indignity of having had its roof removed, and so had fallen into ruin. Even so, considering MacLellan’s Castle’s roof had been removed almost two hundred years before the one at Slains, it had seemed to be bearing up wonderfully well.

Ross had shown me around it as part of our tour, and we’d walked round the outside on tidy gravel pathways edged by neatly clipped sections of lawn and new-flowering borders so that he could show me the armorial engravings chiseled over the front doorway. I confess I’d paid little attention except to the fact that the arms had been those of the laird and his second wife, with whom he’d apparently been very happy, and that had started me thinking about second marriages.

And that, I knew, was at the core of my problem.

I needed Sophia to marry again as she’d done in real life, but I couldn’t see how she’d be happy with anyone other than John, and my fear was that once I got into the writing, I’d find that she hadn’t been happy—that she’d only married my ancestor for the security, or to get out of Kirkcudbright, or for some other practical reason. And once I had written the scene, I’d be stuck with it. I couldn’t change what had actually happened, not even to satisfy Jane’s desire for a happy ending.

It wouldn’t ring true.

That was why I was restlessly pacing my room now, unable to focus enough to just sit down and write.

I’d never had writer’s block, but sometimes when I was approaching a scene that I didn’t want to deal with I had trouble getting on with it, and pairing Sophia with David McClelland would be, in some ways, even harder than killing off Moray. My subconscious sensed what was coming and shrank from the task, finding any excuse not to work.

A part of me wanted to just pull the plug on my laptop and go straight to bed and forget the whole thing, and I might have, except at that moment Sophia’s voice started to form in my mind, her words faint but insistent.

She’d said them before, when she’d spoken to Kirsty before leaving Slains. And though, when she had said them, she’d been speaking of her childhood, I believed that in this room, here in this place, her words meant more than that. I felt them like a nudge at my shoulder, encouraging me to go on.

I did not suffer in Kirkcudbright, she reminded me.

And what else could I do, I thought, but take her at her word?