Trigger Warning

‘They gnawed his bones clean, one by one, and they gave them to his new mother, the sea. She shed no tears and took them without a word. She’s cruel.

‘Some nights I wish he had not told me the truth. He could have lied.

‘They gave my boy’s bones to the sea, but the ship’s mate – who had known my husband, and known me too, better than my husband thought he did, if truth were told – he kept a bone, as a keepsake.

‘When they got back to land, all of them swearing my boy was lost in the storm that sank the ship, he came in the night, and he told me the truth of it, and he gave me the bone, for the love there had once been between us.

‘I said, you’ve done a bad thing, Jack. That was your son that you’ve eaten.

‘The sea took him too, that night. He walked into her, with his pockets filled with stones, and he kept walking. He’d never learned to swim.

‘And I put the bone on a chain to remember them both by, late at night, when the wind crashes the ocean waves and tumbles them onto the sand, when the wind howls around the houses like a baby crying.’

The rain is easing, and you think she is done, but now, for the first time, she looks at you, and appears to be about to say something. She has pulled something from around her neck, and now she is reaching it out to you.

‘Here,’ she says. Her eyes, when they meet yours, are as brown as the Thames. ‘Would you like to touch it?’

You want to pull it from her neck, to toss it into the river for the mudlarks to find or to lose. But instead you stumble out from under the canvas awning, and the water of the rain runs down your face like someone else’s tears.

‘The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains . . .’

You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things. For where I left him. For what I did. But I will not forgive myself for the year that I hated my daughter, when I believed her to have run away, perhaps to the city. During that year I forbade her name to be mentioned, and if her name entered my prayers when I prayed, it was to ask that she would one day learn the meaning of what she had done, of the dishonour that she had brought to our family, of the red that ringed her mother’s eyes.

I hate myself for that, and nothing will ease the hatred, not even what happened that final night, on the side of the mountain.

I had searched for nearly ten years, although the trail was cold. I would say that I found him by accident, but I do not believe in accidents. If you walk the path, eventually you must arrive at the cave.

But that was later. First, there was the valley on the mainland, the whitewashed house in the gentle meadow with the burn splashing through it, a house that sat like a square of white sky against the green of the grass and the heather just beginning to purple.

And there was a boy outside the house, picking wool from off a thornbush. He did not see me approaching, and he did not look up until I said, ‘I used to do that. Gather the wool from the thornbushes and twigs. My mother would wash it, then she would make me things with it. A ball, and a doll.’

He turned. He looked shocked, as if I had appeared out of nowhere. And I had not. I had walked many a mile, and had many more miles to go. I said, ‘I walk quietly. Is this the house of Calum MacInnes?’

The boy nodded, drew himself up to his full height, which was perhaps two fingers bigger than mine, and he said, ‘I am Calum MacInnes.’

‘Is there another of that name? For the Calum MacInnes that I seek is a grown man.’

The boy said nothing, just unknotted a thick clump of sheep’s wool from the clutching fingers of the thornbush. I said, ‘Your father, perhaps? Would he be Calum MacInnes as well?’

The boy was peering at me. ‘What are you?’ he asked.

‘I am a small man,’ I told him. ‘But I am a man, nonetheless, and I am here to see Calum MacInnes.’

‘Why?’ The boy hesitated. Then, ‘And why are you so small?’

I said, ‘Because I have something to ask your father. Man’s business.’ And I saw a smile start at the tips of his lips. ‘It’s not a bad thing to be small, young Calum. There was a night when the Campbells came knocking on my door, a whole troop of them, twelve men with knives and sticks, and they demanded of my wife, Morag, that she produce me, as they were there to kill me, in revenge for some imagined slight. And she said, “Young Johnnie, run down to the far meadow, and tell your father to come back to the house, that I sent for him.” And the Campbells watched as the boy ran out the door. They knew that I was a most dangerous person. But nobody had told them that I was a wee man, or if that had been told them, it had not been believed.’

‘Did the boy call you?’ said the lad.

‘It was no boy,’ I told him, ‘but me myself, it was. And they’d had me, and still I walked out the door and through their fingers.’

The boy laughed. Then he said, ‘Why were the Campbells after you?’