Entry Island (43 page)

I sit writing this tonight with a real sense that there is some force that guides our lives in ways that we will never understand. I could, I suppose, attribute it to God. But then I would have to credit Him with the bad as well as the good, and to be truthful I am no longer sure what I believe. Life has treated me well and badly in almost equal measure, but it is the bad that always tests our faith. In a strange way we tend to take the good for granted. But I shall never do that again. Not after today.

I have been in Quebec City all this week at an exhibition of my work in the old walled town, almost in the shadow of the Château Haldimand. There are sixty works in the exhibition, and today was the final day, with only two paintings remaining to be sold. It was late afternoon and I was preparing to leave shortly when a young lady entered the gallery.

She was an extraordinarily pretty young woman, which is what immediately drew my eye, although to be honest she was not of the class that one would expect to be visiting an
art gallery. I calculated that she was probably in her late teens or early twenties, and while very presentable she was plainly dressed, as you might expect of a maid or a serving girl. But there was something about her that fascinated me, and I could hardly stop myself from watching her as she wandered casually around the gallery moving from one painting to the next. She took some time over each picture, and seemed quite engrossed.

There were others in the gallery at the time, and I became distracted by a potential buyer asking me questions about one of my unsold works.

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.’

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.

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.

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.’

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.