Peter May - Entry Island

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.

He meant to leave Annie a note in the kitchen, but found her sitting in her dressing gown at the kitchen table nursing a mug of coffee. She was pale and looked up at him with penumbrous eyes. ‘I think I’ve caught your disease, Sime. Haven’t slept a wink all night.’ Her gaze dropped to the overnight bag in his hand. ‘Planning on leaving without saying goodbye?’

He placed his folded note on the table. ‘I was going to leave this for you.’ He smiled. ‘Didn’t want to disturb you.’

She grinned. ‘As if.’ Then, ‘I guess you didn’t sleep either.’

‘There was something going round and round my head all night, sis. Something Dad used to say. The blood is strong.’

Annie smiled. ‘Yes, I remember that.’

‘I never really understood what he meant, till now.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, we always knew we were Scottish, right? I mean, Mum’s family originally came from Scotland, too. But it never seemed to matter. It was just history. Like the stories from the diaries. Somehow I never really believed these were real people. It never occurred to me that we are who we are now because of them. That we only exist because of the hardship they survived, the courage it took just to stay alive.’

She gazed up at him with thoughtful eyes. ‘I always felt that connection, Sime.’

He shook his head. ‘I didn’t. I always felt, I don’t know, sort of dislocated. Not really part of anything. Not even my own family.’ He glanced at her self-consciously. ‘Until now. In those dreams, I felt Sime’s pain, sis. When I read those stories, I feel such empathy. And the ring...’ Almost unconsciously he ran the tips of the fingers of his left hand across the engraving in the carnelian. ‘It’s almost like touching him.’ He closed his eyes. ‘The blood is strong.’

When he opened them again he saw the love in her eyes. She stood up and took both his hands. ‘It is, Sime.’

‘I’m so sorry, Annie.’

‘What on earth for?’

‘For not loving you like I should. For never being the brother you deserved.’

She smiled sadly. ‘I’ve always loved you, Sime.’

He nodded acknowledgement. ‘Which is why you deserve better.’

She just shook her head, then glanced towards his bag. ‘Do you have the diaries?’

He nodded. ‘I want to read them, cover to cover. And sort out my head. Somehow I have to try and figure all this out.’

‘Don’t be a stranger, then.’

‘I won’t. I promise. I’ll be back first chance I get.’

Annie placed her mug carefully on the table and stood up. ‘I never asked you yesterday.’ She paused. ‘Did she do it? Kirsty Cowell. Did she kill her husband?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t think she did.’

‘Then you have to do something about that.’

He nodded. ‘I do. But there’s someone I have to see here before I go.’

She waited until he had gone before she opened his note and read the three words he had written on it.