Entry Island Page 34

  When he had gone, without buying I might add, the sound of a lady clearing her throat made me turn, and there she was standing at my elbow. There was such an intensity in her eyes that my stomach flipped over. Close up she was even more beautiful than from a distance. She smiled. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, sir. They tell me that you are the artist.’

  I felt quite unusually bashful. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Scottish landscapes, I think.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘They are very beautiful.’

  ‘Thank you.’ My tongue seemed to be sticking to the roof of my mouth.

  ‘But they’re not just anywhere in Scotland, are they?’

  I smiled. ‘Well, no. They are all landscapes of the Outer Hebrides.’

  ‘And why did you choose that particular place?’

  I laughed. ‘It’s where I grew up.’ I hesitated. ‘Are you interested in buying?’

  ‘Oh, good Lord, no!’ She almost laughed. ‘I couldn’t afford to, even if I had somewhere to hang them.’ Her smile faded, and there was the strangest, most awkward silence between us. And suddenly she said, ‘Why did you come to Canada?’

  I was quite taken aback by her directness, but answered her unexpected question honestly. ‘Because my village on the Isle of Lewis and Harris was cleared by its landlord. I had no choice.’

  ‘And where did you sail from?’

  I frowned now, becoming a little irritated by her questions. But I remained polite. ‘Glasgow,’ I said.

  She looked at me very directly. ‘Aboard the Eliza?’

  Now I was astonished. ‘Well, yes. But how could you possibly know that? You would have been no more than a baby at the time.’

  Her smile seemed to me tinged with sadness. ‘That’s exactly what I was,’ she said. ‘Delivered aboard the Eliza by a Highlander who knew how to recover a baby from the breech position.’

  I swear that my heart stopped beating for a full minute.

  ‘A man who gave me my life,’ she said. ‘I had always known that his name was Sime Mackenzie.’ Her eyes never left mine for one moment. ‘I first heard about you, maybe three years ago. An article in the newspaper. And I’d always wondered, but never dared hope until now that you would be that man.’

  I had no idea what to say. A million emotions clouded my thinking, but all I wanted to do was hold her in my arms, as I had done on the Eliza all those years before. Of course, I didn’t. I just stood there like an idiot.

  ‘The family who raised me gave me their surname, Mackinnon. And the Christian name of my mother.’

  ‘Catrìona,’ the name slipped from my lips in a whisper.

  ‘I wanted to give you this,’ she said.

  And she took out a gold signet ring with an arm and sword engraved in red carnelian. I could hardly believe my eyes. The ring that Ciorstaidh had given me on the quay in Glasgow the day that I lost her. And along with the cash borrowed from Michaél, the ring that I had given to the Mackinnon family into whose care I left the baby at Grosse Île. The only thing of any value that I possessed. My last link to Ciorstaidh, and the greatest sacrifice I could have made.

  ‘I suppose it must have been worth a small fortune,’ Catrìona said. ‘But they never sold it. Couldn’t bring themselves to do it. The money you gave them helped them on their way to a new life, and I grew up with this ring on a chain around my neck.’ She held it out to me. ‘I’m giving it back to you now as a thank you for the gift of life that you gave me.’

  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.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Saturday, 25th December 1869

  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.

  Sunday, 13th August 1871

  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 ye
ars,’ 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.

  Finally he gave up, letting the night wash over him, and tried to empty his mind of all thoughts, watching the ceiling, and wondering if he was any more than a pawn in some timeless game without start or finish.

  At some point during the night, without any real sense of where it had come from, he remembered something that his father had been in the habit of quoting when it came to matters of the family and his Scottish roots. The blood is strong, Sime. The blood is strong. And that refrain remained with him through all the hours of darkness, endlessly repeating until the first grey light fell like dust from the sky, and he rose early hoping not to disturb the rest of the household.

  He meant to leave Annie a note in the kitchen, but found her sitting in her dressing gown at the kitchen table nursing a mug of coffee. She was pale and looked up at him with penumbrous eyes. ‘I think I’ve caught your disease, Sime. Haven’t slept a wink all night.’ Her gaze dropped to the overnight bag in his hand. ‘Planning on leaving without saying goodbye?’

  He placed his folded note on the table. ‘I was going to leave this for you.’ He smiled. ‘Didn’t want to disturb you.’

  She grinned. ‘As if.’ Then, ‘I guess you didn’t sleep either.’

  ‘There was something going round and round my head all night, sis. Something Dad used to say. The blood is strong.’

  Annie smiled. ‘Yes, I remember that.’

  ‘I never really understood what he meant, till now.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, we always knew we were Scottish, right? I mean, Mum’s family originally came from Scotland, too. But it never seemed to matter. It was just history. Like the stories from the diaries. Somehow I never really believed these were real people. It never occurred to me that we are who we are now because of them. That we only exist because of the hardship they survived, the courage it took just to stay alive.’

  She gazed up at him with thoughtful eyes. ‘I always felt that connection, Sime.’

  He shook his head. ‘I didn’t. I always felt, I don’t know, sort of dislocated. Not really part of anything. Not even my own family.’ He glanced at her self-consciously. ‘Until now. In those dreams, I felt Sime’s pain, sis. When I read those stories, I feel such empathy. And the ring …’ Almost unconsciously he ran the tips of the fingers of his left hand across the engraving in the carnelian. ‘It’s almost like touching him.’ He closed his eyes. ‘The blood is strong.’

  When he opened them again he saw the love in her eyes. She stood up and took both his hands. ‘It is, Sime.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Annie.’

  ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘For not loving you like I should. For never being the brother you deserved.’

  She smiled sadly. ‘I’ve always loved you, Sime.’

  He nodded acknowledgement. ‘Which is why you deserve better.’

  She just shook her head, then glanced towards his bag. ‘Do you have the diaries?’

  He nodded. ‘I want to read them, cover to cover. And sort out my head. Somehow I have to try and figure all this out.’

  ‘Don’t be a stranger, then.’

  ‘I won’t. I promise. I’ll be back first chance I get.’

  Annie placed her mug carefully on the table and stood up. ‘I never asked you yesterday.’ She paused. ‘Did she do it? Kirsty Cowell. Did she kill her husband?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t think she did.’

  ‘Then you have to do something about that.’

  He nodded. ‘I do. But there’s someone I have to see here before I go.’

  *

  She waited until he had gone before she opened his note and read the three words he had written on it.

  I love you.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  The road was quiet as he turned on to Highway 108 east, just one or two trucks out early to make up time before the traffic got going. It cut like an arrow through the forest, and as he d
rove the sun came up over the trees to set their leaves alight. He had to lower his visor to avoid being blinded.

  At the village of Gould he pulled off the road into a parking area in front of an old auberge. Next door to it was the Chalmers United Church built in 1892, a plain redbrick building surrounded by neatly kept lawns. There was not much left of the original village, just a few scattered houses set back from the old crossroads. Gone were the schools and churches that had sprung up through the nineteenth century. Most of the plots of land so painstakingly cleared by those early settlers had been reclaimed by the forest, almost all evidence that they had ever existed vanished for ever.

  He stood and gazed across the woodland. Somewhere out there was the land that his ancestor had cleared.

  Lingwick cemetery was about a hundred metres away on the other side of the road, raised up on a hill that looked out over the trees that smothered the eastern province. An elevated resting place for the dead of a far-off land.

  The cemetery itself was immaculately kept. Sime walked up the grassy slope to its wrought-iron gates, their shadows extending down the hill to meet him in the early morning sunlight. He paused by the stone gateposts and read the inscription at his right hand. In recognition of the courage and integrity of the Presbyterian pioneers from the Island of Lewis, Scotland. This gate is dedicated to their memory.

  The gravestones themselves were set in rows following the contour of the hill. Morrisons and Macleans. Macneils, Macritchies and Macdonalds. Macleods and Nicholsons. And there, in the shade of the forest that pressed in along the east side of the cemetery, was the weathered, lichen-stained headstone of Sime Mackenzie. Born March 18th, 1829, Isle of Lewis and Harris, Scotland. Died November 23rd, 1904. So he had lived to be seventy-five, and to see in the new century. He had given life to the woman who bore him his son, and seen it taken away. His love for the woman to whom he had been unable to keep the promise made on that tragic day on the banks of the River Clyde had never been fulfilled.