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.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
On this Christmas day, in the coldest, darkest month of the year, it gives me the most extraordinary pleasure to record that shortly after dinner tonight, I proposed to Catrìona Mackinnon, the child whom I brought into this world twenty-two years ago, and with whom I have fallen deeply in love. To my inexpressible joy she has accepted, and we are to be married in the spring, just as soon as the snows have melted and the warmth of the sun brings life back to the land.
This is the last entry I shall ever make. I write it to record the birth of my baby son, Angus, named after my father. And the death of his mother, Catrìona, in childbirth. At one and the same time the happiest and the worst day of my life.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
I
A soft knocking at his door pierced his emotions. He stood up. ‘Yes?’ he said, and the door opened. Annie was still wearing her coat. She looked at him with concern, and crossed the room to wipe away his silent tears.
‘You’ve read to the end, then.’
He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
‘So sad,’ Annie said. ‘To have gone through everything he did, only to lose her in childbirth.’
And Sime thought about his own child, lost even before it had been born. He said, ‘What I don’t understand is how Kirsty Cowell comes to be in possession of the pendant. They’re matching pieces, Annie.’
She took his hand and looked at his ring. ‘If only it could speak to us,’ she said. Then she looked up. ‘Come on, I’ve got something to show you.’
They climbed creaking stairs to the attic over the garage. Cold electric light from above cast angled shadows across the steps, and dust billowed through it as Annie raised the trapdoor to let them into the attic. Almost the entire floor space was taken up with boxes and trunks and packing cases, old furniture covered in dust-sheets, paintings and mirrors stacked against the walls.
‘Like I told you, just about everything of value that came from Mom and Dad’s place is up here,’ Annie said. ‘And when Granny died I had all her things brought here too, at least until I could decide what to do with them.’ The accumulated detritus of dead people’s lives was mired in the deep shadows thrown by a single naked light bulb. ‘I hadn’t been into the attic in years,’ she said. ‘Until after you phoned, and I came up here to find the diaries.’
She squeezed her way through tea chests and cardboard boxes, and big pieces of antique furniture loosely covered with tattered bedsheets.
‘I noticed the pictures stacked against the far wall at the time. I didn’t pay any attention then, but thinking about it again today I realised they must have been the paintings that came from Granny’s house. The ones that hung on the walls there when we were kids. And it occurred to me that they might have been Sime Mackenzie’s.’
He followed her to the far end of the attic and a stack of a dozen or more framed pictures leaning face-in against the wall.
‘While you were reading the diaries I thought I’d come up and take a look.’
She lifted up the nearest of the pictures and turned it to hold in the light. It was an oil painting, darkened now by age. A landscape of a bleak Hebridean vista. Low black cloud hanging over green and purple bog, sunlight breaking through in the far distance, reflecting on some long-lost loch. It was any landscape from any one of Sime’s dreams, or like any one of the pictures conjured by his granny’s reading of the diaries. Images informed by the pictures that had hung on her walls. It made him think of the painting that hung in his own apartment. Annie tilted it to show him the signature. ‘SM,’ she said. ‘It’s one of his.’
One by one she handed the paintings back to Sime. All of them were painted by his ancestor. An arc of silver sand, with the sea rolling in, green and stormy. The view of a blackhouse village from the hill above it. Baile Mhanais. The same village again, with its roofs ablaze, men running between the houses with torches, uniformed constables lined up along the hill. The clearance.
‘And this one,’ she said finally. ‘I remembered it as soon as I saw it. It hung above the fireplace. And it bears his signature.’ She hesitated. ‘Is this her?’
Sime took it and turned it towards the light, and for the second time in a week his world stood still. A young woman in her late teens gazed at him from the canvas. Blue Celtic eyes, dark hair falling abundantly to her shoulders. The slight quizzical smile that was so familiar. A red oval pendant set in gold hung on a chain around her neck. And although the engraving was not clear, it formed the distinctive V of the crooked arm that held the sword on his ring.
In the deep, soft silence of the attic his voice came like the scratch of horsehair on the strings of a cello. ‘It’s Kirsty.’ Younger, certainly, but unmistakably her. And he, too, recalled now the portrait above the fireplace. All those hours and days, weeks and months over years that they had spent together in their grandmother’s house. No wonder he had been so sure he knew her.
He turned it over and wiped away an accumulation of dust and cobwebs to uncover a date. 24th December 1869. The day before his ancestor proposed to Catrìona. Below the date was the faintest pencil outline of a single word. A name. He read it out loud. ‘Ciorstaidh.’ A final farewell to his lost love. Painted from memory as he had last seen her.
He looked up and everything was a blur. ‘I don’t understand.’
Annie said, ‘The woman on Entry Island must be a descendant, or related in some way.’
Sime shook his head. ‘No.’
‘But she has the pendant.’
He had rarely felt so lost. ‘I can’t explain it, sis. I would have sworn this was her. And, yes, she has the pendant that matches the ring. The same pendant that appears in the portrait. But I’ve seen her great-great-great-grandmother’s grave. Her date of birth. She would have been the same age as Sime’s Ciorstaidh from Langadail.’ He paused, remembering the cold of the stone when he laid his hand upon it, and pictured the inscription. ‘She was even Kirsty, too. But not Kirsty Guthrie. Her name was McKay. Daughter of Alasdair and Margaret.’
II
Even had he not been suffering from insomnia, he would never have slept that night. His brain was in turmoil, trying to make sense of impossible connections. Replaying again and again every conversation he’d had with Kirsty Cowell. Every story from the diaries.