‘You wouldn’t remember if one of those wills had been proved around 1699?’ I asked, almost not wanting to know what the answer might be.
He paused. ‘Why 1699?’
I thought about my character Sophia telling Kirsty of the kind of man her father was, and how he’d died on board the ship to Darien. And the first Scots expeditions into Darien, if I remembered rightly, had begun in 1699.
Aloud I said, ‘It doesn’t matter. Just forget I asked,’ and steered our talk to other things.
He wasn’t on the phone for too much longer, and when we’d said goodbye I went to make a cup of coffee, thinking maybe, with the help of some caffeine, I could pick up again where I’d been interrupted in my writing.
But it didn’t work.
I was just sitting there and staring at the cursor blinking on the screen, when my father called back later on.
‘What do you know,’ he asked, ‘that I don’t know?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Well, I went back on the Scottish will site, and I found a will there for James Paterson, in 1699, in which he leaves a third of his estate to his wife, Mary, and another third to be divided between his two daughters, Anna and Sophia.’ His small silence was accusing. ‘That doesn’t mean, of course, that he’s in any way connected to us, or that his Sophia is the one who later married David John McClelland, but still… how did you hit on that year, in particular?’
I cleared my throat. ‘Who did he leave the final third to?’
‘What?’
‘The final third of his estate. Who did he leave it to?’
‘A friend of his. I don’t recall…oh, here it is. John Drummond.’
It was my turn to be silent.
‘Carrie?’ asked my father. ‘Are you still there?’
‘I’m still here.’ But that was not exactly true, because a part of me, I knew, was slipping backward through the darkness, to a young girl named Sophia, living in the stern, unloving household of her Uncle John—John Drummond—while she dreamed of fields of grass that once had bowed before her when she walked, and of the morning air that carried happiness upon it, and the mother who lived only in her memory.
CHAPTER 9
THE CASTLE WOOD WAS silent at this hour of the morning. No rooks were wheeling round the treetops, though I saw a few hunched high up in the bare and twisted branches, looking down on me in silence as I passed.
The garden gnomes, more welcoming, laughed up at me from their close huddled spot beside the front walk of the neat, white-painted bungalow. And Dr Weir seemed pleased I’d come to visit.
‘How’s the book coming?’ he asked me, ushering me into the front entry, with its atmosphere of comfort and tradition.
‘Fine, thank you.’
He hung my jacket on the hall tree. ‘Come into the study. Elsie’s just gone with a friend up to Peterhead to have a wander round the shops. She’ll be sorry she missed you.’
He’d clearly been all set to enjoy his day of solitude— beside his leather wing chair in the study lay a tidy stack of books, and on the smoking table one of the great cut-glass tumblers that we’d used the other night was sitting with a generous dash of whisky in it, waiting. Dr Weir explained it as, ‘My morning draught. I always thought the ancient ways of starting off the day were more appealing. An improvement over soggy breakfast flakes.’
I smiled. ‘I thought the morning draught was meant to be strong ale, with toast.’
‘I’ve had the toast already. And in Scotland, we did things a little differently,’ he said. ‘A man might have his ale and toast, but he’d not be a man unless he finished with a dram of good Scots spirits.’
‘Ah.’
He smiled back. ‘But I could make you tea.’
‘I wouldn’t mind a morning draught myself, if that’s all right.’
‘Of course.’ His eyebrows raised a fraction, but he didn’t look at all shocked as he saw me settled into the chintz armchair by the window, as before, with my own glass of whisky beside me.
‘So,’ he said. ‘What brings you by this morning?’
‘Actually, I had a question.’
‘Something about Slains?’
‘No. Something medical.’
That took him by surprise. ‘Oh, aye?’
‘I wondered…’ This was not as easy as I’d hoped. I took a drink. ‘It has to do with memory.’
‘What, specifically?’
I couldn’t answer that until I’d laid the background properly, and so I started with the book itself, and how the writing of it was so unlike anything I’d experienced before, and how sometimes it felt that I wasn’t putting it down on paper so much as trying to keep up with it. And I told him how I’d picked Sophia Paterson, my ancestor, to be my viewpoint character. ‘She didn’t come from here,’ I said. ‘She came from near Kirkcudbright, in the west. I only put her in the story because I needed somebody, a woman, who could bind all the historical characters together.’