Maggie’s music, which she now performs as well as teaches, has indeed become her ship, as she predicted, and it carries her to great adventures. She was built to have adventures, I believe. It’s in her blood, says Lily, being she’s a Graeme.
But I’ve known that from the time she was a bairn.
When I first handed her the letters from her father that I’d taken out of Archie’s pocket on the night he died, Maggie took them with both hands and thanked me, and said, “Someday, I will go to France and look for him.”
She did. Although to tell the story truly, it was Colonel Graeme who did come to fetch her into France, but that’s a tale best told by Maggie, for she tells it well.
But wait…my critic wants to have a word.
She has come to read this over and correct what I have written. This is properly her room, not mine, lined with its shelves of all the books that she so loves, and the warm lamplight in the evenings, and the windows looking to the changing sea.
“You could have been more clear,” she says, “at the beginning.”
“I was clear enough.”
“You did not tell them all the truth.”
I’ve always liked the answer Robert Moray gave to me, and so I use it now: “All men leave pieces out when they tell tales,” I say. “It is no crime.”
She sighs, and picks a kitten up and puts it in the basket.
“They will get there in the end,” I promise. Readers always do.
“You’ve been too long indoors,” she tells me, “and the day is fine.”
She stands beside me. Holds her hand out. “Let’s go see the ships.”
It is her favorite thing to do, still.
Years ago, I cleared some of the trees along the forest’s edge to let the sunlight through enough so she could have her garden, and it drives its roots more deeply every year, spreading scent and color in the most unlikely places.
Jacob Wilde’s old house yet stands like a white beacon on the hill across the bay, and now his son has brought his own young family there to live. Their boats pass briskly back and forth between their own cove and our town.
Lily likes to look, not to the bay, but to the larger ships that travel through the Sound between New York’s great harbor and the open sea.
When I was but a lad I used to stand upon this hill and feel a pain at every passing sail, because I wished the ships would carry me to somewhere else—to somewhere I’d belong.
I do not feel that, anymore.
Now, when I see a sail pass by, I no longer feel envy for those sailors who are looking back to shore, where I am standing close by my own home and hearth in comfort.
I think often of the vanished days that Captain Gordon spoke about—the ones that are behind us that we cannot live again—and how he wished it might be possible to make the clock run backward so that we could live those days a second time, and live them better. But he had it wrong, I think, because I would not wish to change the way I lived them. I’d not be the man I am if I had not lived every hour of them, for all the pain they brought me and for all the pain I caused. Those vanished days that seemed at times so dark and so devoid of purpose had their moments still of light and happiness, which I have come to realize through the writing of this narrative. And in the end, they led me back to Lily, to the woman who has always made me whole. Who grows more beautiful, to my eyes, with each day that we are given.
I have come a farther distance than I ever had in mind when I began that walk in darkness up the street to Turnbull’s lodgings; farther still from where I started, in that narrow close in Leith. But I have finished with my wanderings.
And so the time has come for me to lay my pen down, and to leave you here amid the others who have joined me in this chamber these past days, and who have kept me such good company.
Let other men write braver tales.
I am no longer weary in this home that we have built on the foundations that were left to me, where my wife waits with hand outstretched to hold my own. Where she yet holds my heart.
Where she remains—as she has been from our first meeting—my own lass.
For now and always.
THE END
About the Characters
One of the most beloved of Scottish writers, Robert Louis Stevenson, says in his Essays in the Art of Writing that a novel “is first cloudily conceived in the mind;… On the approach to execution all is changed.”
That was certainly true with this novel.
It was conceived, and cloudily, when I sat down with Darien: The Scottish Dream of Empire by John Prebble, and read this: “A hundred women were sailing with the expedition at the Company’s expense… Most of them were loyal wives, and all but a few of them are now nameless.”