by Peter May
They walked in silence for almost half its length until they stopped, by some mutual unspoken consent, and he turned her towards him. Her face was in shadow, and he put a finger under her chin to turn it up to the light. At first she wouldn’t meet his eye.
“I remember the little girl who took me in hand that first day at school,” he said. “And walked me up the road to the Crobost stores and told me that her name was Marjorie, but that she preferred her Gaelic name of Marsaili. That same little girl who decided that my English name was ugly, and shortened it to Fin. Which is what everyone has called me for the rest of my life.”
She smiled now, a smile touched by sadness, and finally met his eye. “And I remember how I used to love you, Fin Macleod.” Moonlight shimmered in the tears that brimmed in her eyes. “Not sure I ever stopped.”
He leaned in, then, until their lips touched. Warm, tentative, uncertain. And finally they kissed. A soft, sweet kiss full of everything they had once been, and everything they had since lost. His eyes closed, and the regrets and passions of a lifetime washed over him.
And then it was over. She stepped back, breaking free of his arms, and looked at him in the dark. Searching eyes full of fear and doubt. Then she turned and walked away towards the rocks. He stood for a moment watching her go, then had to run to catch her up. When he did she said, without breaking stride, “What did you find out about my dad?”
“I found out that he’s not Tormod Macdonald.”
She stopped dead and turned her frown towards him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean he borrowed, or stole, that identity off a dead boy from Harris. His name was actually Donald John Gillies, and he came from the Isle of Eriskay. The young man they took out of the bog was his brother, Donald Peter.”
Marsaili gaped at him in disbelief.
“Only Donald John isn’t his real name either.” He saw her whole world falling apart in the look of pain that creased her eyes. All the certainties of her life shifting beneath her feet like the sand she stood on.
“I don’t understand . . .”
And he told her everything that he had learned, and how he had learned it. She listened in silence, her face paler than the moon, and in the end put a hand on his arm to steady herself.
“My dad was a homer?”
Fin nodded. “An orphan in all probability. Or a child in care, shipped out to the islands with his brother by the Catholic Church.”
She slumped down into the sand, sitting cross-legged, her face falling forward into open hands. At first he thought she was crying, but when she took her face out of her hands it was dry. Shock had blunted all other emotions. Fin sat down beside her. She gazed out over the transient benevolence of the sea and said, “It’s strange. You think you know who you are, because you think you know who your parents are. Some things are just . . .” she searched for the word “. . . unquestioned, unquestionable.” She shook her head. “And then suddenly you learn that your whole life has been based on a lie, and you’ve no idea who you are any more.” She turned to look at him, eyes wide with disillusion. “Did my dad kill his brother?”
And Fin realized then that while for him it might be possible to accept the idea that her father’s true origins and who murdered his brother might never be discovered, Marsaili could not rest until she knew the truth. “I don’t know.” He put an arm around her and she rested her head on his shoulder.
They sat like that for a long time, listening to the slow, steady pulse of the ocean, drenched in moonlight, until he felt her trembling with the cold. But she made no attempt to move. “I went to see him, just before I left for Glasgow, and found him sitting in the rain. He thought he was on a boat. The Claymore, he said it was, sailing from the mainland.” She turned to look at Fin, her eyes clouded and sad. “I thought he was just rambling. Something he’d seen on television or read in a book. At first he called me Catherine, and then Ceit, like I was someone he knew. Not his daughter. And he talked about someone else called Big Kenneth.”
“Beinn Ruigh Choinnich. It’s the mountain that shelters the harbour at Lochboisdale. They would have seen it from the ferry, from a long way off.” He reached out a hand to brush stray hairs from her eyes. “What else did he say, Marsaili?”
“Nothing that made much sense. At least, not then. He was talking to Ceit, not me. He said he would never forget their days at The Dean. Or the turrets at Danny’s. Something like that. Reminding them of their place in the world.” She looked at him with pain etched in every line of her face. “And something else, that takes on a whole different meaning now.” She closed her eyes, trying to recall exactly. Then opened them wide. “He said, we didn’t do too bad for a couple of orphan waifs.”
There must have been light in Fin’s eyes, because she frowned, canting her head, staring at him. “What is it?”
And if she had seen light, it was the light of revelation. He said, “Marsaili, I think maybe I know exactly what he meant when he talked about The Dean. And Danny’s turrets. And it must mean that Ceit, the girl who boarded with the widow O’Henley, came with them on the boat.” And he thought, maybe there is someone after all who still knows the truth. He stood, then, and offered Marsaili his hand. She pulled herself up to stand beside him. He said, “If we can get seats, we should try to be on the first flight to Edinburgh tomorrow.”
The only light in the room came from the blue-tinged illumination of his laptop computer screen. He sat alone at the desk, in the dark, the stillness of the house pressing in all around him. The presence of others, in other rooms, seemed somehow only to increase his sense of isolation.
This was the room where he had spent so many hours tutored by Artair’s dad. Where he and Artair had sat, individually or together, listening to long lectures on Hebridean history, or puzzling over mathematical equations. Where the years of his boyhood had passed in suffocating incarceration, freedom glimpsed only occasionally in stolen glances from the window. Marsaili had said he could spend the night on the fold-down settee. But there were too many memories here. The Cyprus-shaped coffee stain on the card table where they worked. The rows of books with their exotic titles, still there on the shelves. The smell of Artair’s dad’s pipe smoke, hanging in the still air in slow-moving blue strands. If he breathed deeply the scent of it remained, even if only in his memory.
Marsaili, fragile and fatigued, had gone to bed some time ago, telling him he could stay as long as he liked, to benefit from Fionnlagh’s wifi. The cursor on his screen winked over a webpage with the crest of the National Galleries of Scotland. Below it, a blue window with cotton-wool clouds announced Another World. Dalí, Magritte, Miró and the Surrealists. But he had long since stopped looking at it. It had taken him almost no time to confirm his suspicions, and immediately reserve their tickets on the morning flight. He had then spent much of the next hour in deep research.
He was tired. An ache behind his eyes. His body felt punched, bruised, his brain short-circuiting thoughts almost as soon as they appeared. He had no desire to go back to Edinburgh, a return to a painful past he had been unable to put behind him. The best he had been able to do was achieve a little distance. Now Fate was robbing him even of that. For Marsaili there would be no closure without it, while for him it would only serve to reopen old wounds.
He wondered, briefly, how she would receive him if he were to slip softly along the hall to her room and slide beneath the covers beside her. Not for sex, or even for love. But for comfort. The warmth of another human being.
But he knew he wouldn’t. He closed the lid of his laptop and moved silently through the house, shutting the kitchen door gently behind him. He walked up the road in the night to where his tent awaited him. Moonlight reflecting on the still of the ocean was almost painfully bright, stars overhead like the white-hot tips of a billion needles pricking the universe. All that awaited him within the soulless confines of his tent were a cold sleeping bag, a few sheets of paper in a buff folder describing the death of his son, and all th
e sleepless hours he knew he would have to endure before morning.
Thirty
It was milder in Edinburgh, a light wind blowing in off the Pentland Hills, the sun dipping in and out from behind bubbles of cumulus, splashing light and colour across this grey city of granite and sandstone.
They had brought overnight bags in case of the need to stay, although Fin was not optimistic that they would find anything other than the places of which Marsaili’s father had spoken. A visit that would take them less than an hour. They took a taxi from the airport, and as it approached Haymarket the driver set his indicator going for a left turn into Magdala Crescent. Fin said to him, “Not this way.”
“It’s a short-cut, mate.”
“I don’t care. Go up to Palmerston Place.”
The driver shrugged. “You’re paying.”
Fin felt Marsaili’s eyes on him. Without meeting them he said, “When Padraig MacBean took me out to An Sgeir on his old trawler, he told me the story of how he’d lost his father’s brand-new boat in the Minch. Barely escaped with his life.” He turned to see her eyes fixed upon him, wide with curiosity. “Even though there is nothing to mark the spot where she went down, Padraig said he feels it every time he sails over it.”
“Your son was killed in Magdala Crescent?”
“In a street off it.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
He gazed past the driver, through the windscreen and the traffic stretching ahead of them along West Maitland Street. Finally he said, “No. I don’t think I do.”
The taxi turned into Palmerston Place, past smoke-blackened bay-windowed tenements, a park in early spring leaf, the Gothic grandeur of St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, and down the hill to where the red-sandstone church on the corner had been converted to a youth hostel with pillar-box red doors.
It swung up the hill, then, on Belford Road, to drop them in the forecourt of a Travelodge hotel opposite a stone gateway beneath a blue-and-white banner fluttering in the breeze.
“Dean Gallery,” Marsaili read when they stepped out of the cab. Fin paid the driver and turned to face her confusion. “The Dean is an art gallery?”
Fin nodded. “It is now.” He took her arm and they ran across the road between cars. Through a black, wrought-iron gate they followed a narrow cobbled path up the hill between a high privet hedge and a stone wall. The path opened up then, and curved its way through parkland shaded by tall chestnuts, where bronze statues stood on stone plinths planted on manicured lawns. “In the days before the welfare state,” he said, “there was something in Scotland called the Poor Law. It was a kind of social security for the poorest in society, pretty much paid for by the Church. And where there were gaps, sometimes private charities stepped in. The Orphan Hospital of Edinburgh was set up in the early 1700s by the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge to fill one of those gaps.”
“This is what you were looking up on the internet last night?”
“Yes.” They passed a tarnished sculpture of the Madonna and Child called The Virgin of Alsace. “In 1833 the hospital moved into a new building, here on the Dean Estate, and it became known as the Dean Orphanage.” An Edinburgh lady of indeterminate age with bob-cut silver hair and navy-blue skirts hurried by with a whiff of floral scent that reminded Fin briefly of Marsaili’s mother.
As they rounded the bend at the top of the hill, The Dean swung into view in all its towering sandstone grandeur: porticos, arched windows, four-cornered towers and stone balustrades. Fin and Marsaili stopped to take it in. There was an odd sense of destiny in finding it here at the top of the hill, hidden behind hedges and trees, revealing itself suddenly like a glimpse into history, national and personal. The circle of fate whose first curve had begun with the departure of Marsaili’s father was completed now by her arrival.
Her voice was hushed by awe. “This was an orphanage?”
“Apparently.”
“My God. It’s a wonderful building, Fin. But no place to bring up orphaned children.”
Fin thought that his aunt’s house had been no place to bring up an orphaned child either. He said, “I read last night that originally they were fed on porridge and kale, and that the orphan girls had to make clothes for all the children to wear. I guess things would have been very different in the fifties.” He paused. “But it’s hard to picture your dad here.”
Marsaili turned to him. “Are you sure this is where he meant?”
He led her a little further up the hill, and pointed beyond The Dean, to the twin towers of another impressive building in the valley below. “Stewart’s Melville,” he said. “A private school. In the days your dad would have been here it was called Daniel Stewart’s College.”
“Danny’s place.”
Fin nodded. “A terrible irony in it, not missed by your dad. The poorest and most deprived children of his generation living cheek by jowl with the most privileged. What was it he said? The turrets at Danny’s had always been a reminder of their place in the world?”
“Yes,” Marsaili said. “At the bottom of the pile.” She turned to Fin. “I want to go in.”
They followed the drive to the portico at the entrance, where steps led up between pillars to a rust-red door. A stone stairway to their left descended to an open green space that might once have been gardens. Fin watched Marsaili’s face as they crossed a tiled vestibule into the main hallway that ran the length of the building. Impressively grand rooms led off either side of it, galleries hung with paintings, or filled with sculptures, a shop, a cafeteria. Light cascaded down at either end of it from windows in the stairwells of each wing. You could very nearly hear the distant echo of lost children.
The emotion in Marsaili’s face was almost painful to watch as she reassessed everything about herself. Who she was, where she had come from, what dreadful kind of a life her father had endured as a boy. Something he had never shared with any of them. His lonely secret.
A uniformed security guard asked if he could help them.
Fin said, “This place used to be an orphanage.”
“Yeah. Hard to believe.” The guard tipped his head towards one end of the corridor. “The boys used to be in that wing, apparently. The girls in the other. The exhibition room along there on the left used to be the headmaster’s office. Or whatever he was called.”
“I want to go,” Marsaili said suddenly, and Fin saw that there were silent tears reflecting light on her cheeks. He slipped his arm through hers and led her back out through the entrance, watched by a bemused guard wondering what it was he had said. She stood breathing deeply at the top of the steps for almost a minute. “We can find out from the records, can’t we? Who he really was, I mean. Where his family came from.”
Fin shook his head. “I checked online last night. The records are kept locked up for a hundred years. Only the children themselves have a right of access to them.” He shrugged. “I guess it’s designed to protect them. Though I suppose the courts could grant the police a warrant to gain access. This is a murder investigation, after all.”
She turned teary eyes in his direction, wiping her cheeks dry with the backs of her hands. He saw in her face the same question he had been unable to answer on the beach the night before. Had her father killed his brother? Fin thought it unlikely they would ever know, unless by some miracle they were able to find the girl called Ceit, who had boarded at the O’Henley croft.
They walked in silence back down the cobbled path to Belford Road, the Dean Cemetery brooding in shaded tranquillity behind a high stone wall. As they arrived at the gate Fin’s mobile phone alerted him to an incoming email. He scrolled through its menu with his finger and tapped to open it. When he took some time to read it, frowning thoughtfully, Marsaili said, “Something important?”
He waited until he had tapped in a response before replying. “When I was looking for references to the Dean Orphanage on the internet last night I came across a forum of former Dean orphans exchanging photographs and remini
scences. I suppose there must be some kind of bond between them all that they still feel, even if they didn’t know one another at The Dean.”
“Like family.”
He looked at her. “Yes. Like the family they never had. You still feel a greater affinity to a second cousin you’ve never met than to some complete stranger.” He pushed his hands deep into his pockets. “A lot of them seem to have emigrated. Australia the most popular destination.”
“As far away from The Dean as they could get.”
“A fresh start, I suppose. Putting a whole world between you and your childhood. Erasing the past.” Every word he uttered had such resonance for Fin that he found himself almost too choked to speak. It was, after all, only what he had done himself. He felt Marsaili’s hand on his arm. The merest touch that said more than anything she could have put into words. “Anyway, there was one of them still living here in Edinburgh. A man called Tommy Jack. He might well have been at The Dean around the same time as your dad. There was an email address. I wrote to him.” He shrugged. “I very nearly didn’t. It was a real afterthought.”
“That was him replying?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“He sent his address and said he would be happy to talk to us this evening at his home.”
Thirty-one
Afternoon sunlight leaked in all around drawn curtains that breathed in and out in the breeze from the open window beyond them. The noise of passing traffic came with it, distant and unreal, along with the sound of falling water from the weir in the Water of Leith below.
Their room was up in the roof, with views across the river and the Dean Village. But Fin had drawn the curtain on it as soon as they entered the room. They needed the dark to find themselves.