Sophia's Secret (16 page)

Hooke looked disappointed. ‘We have been delayed at Dunkirk these past weeks. The winds were contrary.’

Dunkirk, Sophia thought. So they had come from France. And from the pallor of Hooke’s face, their journey had not been a gentle one.

The countess, who missed little, must have drawn the same conclusion, for she said to Colonel Hooke that their delay was of no consequence. ‘But surely you must both be very weary from your voyage. Colonel, please do read your letters, and refresh yourself. There will be time for talk when you have rested.’

‘You are kind. ’Tis sure that travelling by ship does never much improve my health. I should prefer the most ill-tempered horse beneath me to the calmest sea.’

Sophia bravely glanced toward the place where Mr Moray stood in patient silence, noting that the sea did not appear to have in any way affected
his
health. He looked to be fit enough to stand all day, as he was standing, letting others make the conversation. She recalled her father saying, ‘Men who watch, and say but little, very often are much wiser than the men they serve.’ She had a feeling that, in this man’s case, it might be true.

Aware of her appraisal, Moray’s grey eyes shifted quietly to hers, and once again she found she had no will to break the contact.

‘Come, Sophia,’ said the countess, ‘we shall give our visitors some peace.’ And with a smile the countess took her gracious leave of both the gentlemen, and in her wake, Sophia did the same, not daring this time to look back.

She found a refuge in the little corner sewing room, where for a mindless hour or so she struggled with her needlework and tried to think of nothing else. Her fingertips were painful from the
needle-pricks
when she at last gave up and went to look for Kirsty, hoping that companionship might have success where solitude had failed.

At this hour of day, and with guests in the house, Kirsty should have been setting the dining room table for supper, but she was not there. Sophia was still standing in that room, in faint confusion, when the rustling of a woman’s gown, in concert with more manly, measured steps, approaching down the corridor, intruded on her thinking.

The voice of the Countess of Erroll was serious. ‘So, Colonel, I should advise you to not be in haste. You will find his affairs greatly altered, within these past months. All the world has abandoned him, and all the well-affected have come to an open rupture with him. He is suspected of holding a correspondence with the court of London, therefore it would serve you well to be upon your guard before you trusted much to him.’

They were near the open doorway of the dining room. Sophia smoothed her gown and linked her fingers and prepared an explanation of her presence there, for it seemed sure to her they would come in. But they did not. The footsteps and the rustling passed her by, and when Hooke spoke next he had moved too far away for her to know his words.

She felt relieved. She had not meant to listen to a private conversation, and it would have pained her had the countess known she’d done it, even if it were by accident. Eyes briefly closed, she waited one more minute before stepping out herself into the corridor to carry on her search for Kirsty.

She could not have said from which direction Mr Moray had been coming, nor how boots like his upon the floorboards could have made no sound. She only knew that when she stepped out through the doorway he was there, and had it not been for his swift reflexive grabbing of her shoulders, their collision would have surely damaged more than her composure.

He had clearly not expected her to be there either, for his first reaction was to swear, then to retract the oath and ask for her forgiveness. ‘Did I hurt ye?’

‘Not at all.’ She drew back quickly – just a little bit too quickly – from his grasp. ‘The fault is mine. I did not look where I was going.’

He seemed taller here, at such close quarters. If she kept her eyes fixed to the front, they looked directly on a level with his throat, above the knotted neckcloth. He had taken off the buffcoat and replaced it with a jacket of a woven dark green fabric set with silver buttons. She did not look higher.

He seemed interested by her voice. ‘Your accent,’ he said, ‘does not come from Edinburgh.’

She could not think why that would matter, until she remembered that the countess, just that afternoon, had told the men that Mr Hall had journeyed with Sophia up from Edinburgh. Surprised that Mr Moray would have taken note of such a trifle, she said, ‘No. I did but break my journey there.’

‘Where do ye come from, then?’

‘The Western Shires. You would not know the town.’

‘I might surprise ye with my knowledge.’

So she told him, and he nodded. ‘Aye, ’tis near Kirkcudbright, is it not?’ She felt him looking down at her. ‘Are ye then Presbyterian?’

She couldn’t tell him that she was not anything; that living in her uncle’s house, she’d long since lost her faith. Instead she said, ‘My parents were, and I was so baptised, but I was brought up by my aunt and uncle as Episcopalian.’

‘That does explain it.’

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 mudstains 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.’

‘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 dreamt 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.

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?’