Curiosity compelled her to look up at last, and see that he was smiling. ‘What does it explain?’
‘Ye do not have the long and disapproving face,’ he told her, ‘of a Presbyterian. Nor would a lass who goes God-fearing to the Kirk be like to run so free and wanton on the hills above the shore, for God and all the world to see. Unless it was not you I saw this afternoon, when we were being rowed to land?’
She stared at him and made no answer, for it was quite clear he did not need one.
‘Faith, lass,’ he said, ‘there’s no need to look like that. Ye’d not be beaten for it, even if I had a mind to tell. But in the future, if ye wish to keep your pleasures secret, ye’d do well to wash the mud stains from your gown before ye come to greet your company.’
And with that small bit of advice, he took his solemn leave of her and left her in the corridor, and she—
The phone rang loudly, for the second time. Like scissors rending fabric, it effectively destroyed the flow of words, the mood, and with a sigh I stood and went to answer it.
‘Bad timing?’ guessed my father, at the other end.
I lied. ‘Of course not. No, I was just finishing a scene.’ I was out of my writer’s trance, now, and more fully aware of who I was, and where I was, and who was on the phone. And then I started worrying, because my father almost never called me, so I asked, ‘Is something wrong?’
‘No, we’re fine. But you’ve got me back onto the trail of the McClellands. I haven’t done much on them lately, but I thought I’d take minute on the internet, and see if there was anything new on the IGI.’
The IGI, or International Genealogical Index, was one of the most useful tools for family history searchers. It was created and maintained by the Church of Latter Day Saints, whose members went worldwide to search out every single register of marriages and births in every church that they could find. They put the pages of those registers on microfilm, transcribed them, and then indexed them. And now, with the arrival of the internet, the indexes were easier to access, to my father’s great delight.
The index was constantly being updated. When my father had last done a search for McClellands, he hadn’t been able to find any entries that matched our McClellands, the ones in the old family Bible. But this time…
‘I found him,’ my father announced, with that satisfied tone of discovery that he knew I’d understand fully, and share. ‘They’ve done a few more churches since the last update, and when I went online tonight, there it was—David John McClelland’s marriage to Sophia Paterson, on the 13th of June, in Kirkcudbright, in 1710. That’s our man. So I’ll order the actual film, to look at. I likely won’t find out much more. If Scottish records are anything like the ones in Northern Ireland, they won’t mention the parents of either the bride or the groom, but you never do know. We can hope.’
‘That’s great, Daddy.’ Though somehow, with what I’d just written, I didn’t like being reminded that Sophia Paterson had, in real life, married into what probably had been a dull, Presbyterian family.
‘There’s more, though,’ my father assured me. ‘And that’s why I’m calling.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Yes. Remember you said that you’d give your Sophia, the one in your new book, a birthdate of…what was it, 1689?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, on the IGI, I also found the baptism of a Sophia Paterson in Kirkcudbright in December, 1689. How’s that for coincidence? There’s no way, at the moment, we can tell if this is our Sophia. We don’t have anything to cross-reference it with. If we knew the name of our Sophia’s father, we could at least see if it matched the name of the father on the baptism…’
‘James Paterson,’ I murmured automatically.
‘It is James, actually,’ my father said, but he was too amused to think that I’d been serious. It was a running joke between us that whenever we discovered a male ancestor, his name was either John or James, or, very rarely, David—common names that made it difficult to trace them in the records. There might be countless James McClellands listed living in a town, and we would have to check details of every one of them before we found the one that we were after. ‘What we need,’ my father always used to say, ‘is an Octavius, or maybe a Horatio.’
He told me, now, ‘I had a quick look on that Scottish will site, but of course there are so many James Patersons listed there’s no way to narrow them down. I don’t know when he died. And even if I did know, and I managed to download the right will, he would still have to have actually left something to David John McClelland, or to have mentioned a daughter Sophia McClelland, for us to be able to make a connection between them.’