Entry Island

‘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.

I love you.

Chapter forty-three

The road was quiet as he turned on to Highway 108 east, just one or two trucks out early to make up time before the traffic got going. It cut like an arrow through the forest, and as he drove the sun came up over the trees to set their leaves alight. He had to lower his visor to avoid being blinded.

At the village of Gould he pulled off the road into a parking area in front of an old auberge. Next door to it was the Chalmers United Church built in 1892, a plain redbrick building surrounded by neatly kept lawns. There was not much left of the original village, just a few scattered houses set back from the old crossroads. Gone were the schools and churches that had sprung up through the nineteenth century. Most of the plots of land so painstakingly cleared by those early settlers had been reclaimed by the forest, almost all evidence that they had ever existed vanished for ever.

He stood and gazed across the woodland. Somewhere out there was the land that his ancestor had cleared.

Lingwick cemetery was about a hundred metres away on the other side of the road, raised up on a hill that looked out over the trees that smothered the eastern province. An elevated resting place for the dead of a far-off land.

The cemetery itself was immaculately kept. Sime walked up the grassy slope to its wrought-iron gates, their shadows extending down the hill to meet him in the early morning sunlight. He paused by the stone gateposts and read the inscription at his right hand. In recognition of the courage and integrity of the Presbyterian pioneers from the Island of Lewis, Scotland. This gate is dedicated to their memory.

The gravestones themselves were set in rows following the contour of the hill. Morrisons and Macleans. Macneils, Macritchies and Macdonalds. Macleods and Nicholsons. And there, in the shade of the forest that pressed in along the east side of the cemetery, was the weathered, lichen-stained headstone of Sime Mackenzie. Born March 18th, 1829, Isle of Lewis and Harris, Scotland. Died November 23rd, 1904. So he had lived to be seventy-five, and to see in the new century. He had given life to the woman who bore him his son, and seen it taken away. His love for the woman to whom he had been unable to keep the promise made on that tragic day on the banks of the River Clyde had never been fulfilled.

Sime felt an aching sense of sadness for him, for everything he had been through, for ending up here alone, laid for ever to rest in the earth of a foreign place so far from his home.