The Inheritance

by Michael Phillips

  She found Sandy engaging, humorous, energetic, and sharp as a tack. He reminded her of her grandfather back home. She found herself strangely warmed by his presence in the Cottage with her.

  Loni had heard all the details of the unlikely trio who had come together to care for a dying bird. She learned much about Ernest Tulloch and the family of her ancestors. She would have liked to know more about Elizabeth Clark Tulloch, her own great-great-grandmother. But she had come to know Sally—who was something like Loni’s step-great-great-grandmother—through Sandy’s warm recollections.

  She had also learned about the peculiar blocks next to the firewood, which weren’t dried dirt at all. A nice fire of dried chunks of peat now blazed in the hearth, though Sandy confessed himself bewildered where the wood could have come from, for no one on the island burned anything but peat. Loni had even begun to understand the Shetland dialect more easily.

  As they enjoyed a second pot of tea with oatcakes and fruit, she found that the amber brew, softened with white, was growing on her.

  “You may succeed in making a convert of me yet, Sandy!” laughed Loni. “I never thought I would drink three cups of tea in the same day. And I am definitely hooked on the oatcakes! As for the peat, it gives the fire a character all its own.”

  Sandy smiled. “I like tae imagine that there’ll be peat fires in heaven.”

  Silence fell. Both sat with cups in hand, staring into the fire, their minds dwelling on earlier days.

  “You mentioned the last time you saw Mr. Tulloch,” said Loni, “the auld laird—is that how you say it?”

  “Jist fine, lassie.”

  “When was that? He’s been gone now, what is it—about fifty years?”

  “Aye. That was the day o’ the viewin’ here at the Cottage. He was laid tae rest two days later. Everyone came tae pay their respects tae the man, though not a’ kenned him for the man o’ God he was. ’Twas the last time yer whole family was t’gither. Yer grit-gran’mother had returned too. I hadna seen her in twenty-five or thirty years. She didna ken me at first, till I told her who I was. But I could ne’er forget her eyes . . . yer eyes, ye ken.”

  Loni nodded. “I would love to hear about it.”

  “Aye,” said Sandy. “I remember the day as if it were yesterday. He was aye one who kenned what it meant tae give his care intil the hand o’ the Father o’ sparrows an’ men.”

  Though soft, his voice at times scarcely more than a whisper, Sandy began to tell Loni about the day of her great-great grandfather’s funeral. As she listened, the conviction stole upon Loni, exactly as Sandy had said, that this was the inheritance she had come to Scotland to discover. It was not the Cottage at all. The true inheritance was the people who had come before, and the legacy they had left.

  “It was a day o’ tears an’ rejoicin’” Sandy went on. “Tears for us who kenned him here, but I hae nae doobt a day o’ rejoicin’ for the angels in the land o’ his new home. The whole village was on hand tae bid him farewell. I walked along oot fae the village, behind the carriage that bore him, alongside my wife an’ oor daughter. Twas a drizzly cauld day, wi’ rain in the air, an’ a solomn hush spread oor the island.”

  79

  The Coffin

  WHALES REEF, SHETLAND ISLANDS

  It is said that dead men tell no tales.

  The man resting in a plain coffin—plainer than some might say was appropriate for a man of his station—had hoped that in his case exactly the opposite would prove true.

  His heart’s desire was that his earthly days, like his Master’s, might signify as much, and in some cases perhaps more in death to those he loved than it had in life. It would be many years before the results of that prayer would be revealed.

  But on this particular day, the most that could be said was that the dignified repose of his temporary tabernacle meant many things to those who had known him. His death had caused a tumult of controversy, conjecture, not to mention one outburst of scarcely concealed wrath, among those family members who had gathered in the great room of the Cottage two days before. Three had prior inkling of what was coming when Lerwick solicitor Arthur MacNaughton stood to read the will of the family patriarch.

  What followed was as unprecedented as it was unexpected. The terms of the document would change the fortunes of this island and its people, as well as the dead man’s descendants, for generations to come.

  Over the next forty-eight hours, word of the will’s contents circulated through the village like a brushfire. How the villagers learned of it was a mystery. No one from the extended family had breathed a word of it.

  The rampant speculation fueling the island’s rumor mills no doubt doubled the number making today’s pilgrimage to view the body. Not that they expected to learn anything from mourners bearing the Tulloch name. But when news of this magnitude was in the wind, every woman in the village would be nowhere else but in the middle of it. If dead men told no tales, one of the living might inadvertently let some tidbit slip, which, if overheard, could send out a juicy new branch on the ever-widening gossip tree.

  The man at the center of everyone’s thoughts was himself far removed from the commotion surrounding today’s final display of his earthly temple. Its purpose had been fulfilled. He had no more use of it.

  That his prayers were heard, he had had no doubt when he prayed them, and certainly had none now. How and when those heaven-launched arrows would descend back to earth—perfected, elevated, and glorified into oneness with God’s eternal purpose—as answering shafts of light into the hearts of those to whom they were aimed, was known only to the Father of Lights, the Hearer and Answerer and Glorifier of prayers.

  Like many who followed the Master, the life of Ernest Tulloch was misunderstood by many. Few in a village who esteemed him could be said to have truly known him. The quiet passions of such men of stature in the heavenly realms are most often invisible to those whose vision is earthbound.

  Happily death does not close the door to the impact of a man’s life. The parting of the curtain between temporal and eternal is often required to unlock the hearts of those left behind to depths of virtue obscured by earthly reality. To what extent, therefore, this man’s life would signify more in the generations to follow would depend on the men and women whose lives, both physically and spiritually, would descend from his to the third and fourth generation.

  Ernest Tulloch had three sons and one daughter, all of whom loved him. They would continue to discover more and deeper aspects of his influence in their lives for the rest of their days. Two of the sons and the daughter now stood on one side of the open casket, gazing down at their father’s ghostly white face. Their eldest brother, Brogan, was expected later.

  Ernest’s widow and second wife, Sally, draped in black from head to foot, stood opposite the three. She was from northern Shetland and a traditionalist. Some may have objected, but she knew that a conventional open-casket viewing was appropriate. Most would not feel they had dutifully paid their final respects unless they saw her husband’s face.

  Sally smiled at Wallace and Delynn, her husband’s son and daughter by his first marriage, then at her own son, Leith. She then lifted the black veil over her face, walked across the entryway, and opened the two large oak doors.

  The four flanked the entry. A somber line already gathered outside. Behind them a steady stream was coming toward the house from the village.

  Sally and Leith on one side, Wallace and Delynn on the other, nodded in welcome as one by one the villagers began walking slowly into the wide foyer. The interior doors into the rest of the Cottage were all closed.

  In silent single file the mourners approached, each pausing a second or two before the open casket with their dead laird lying peacefully inside it. A few murmured soft words of final farewell. Most of the women shed abundant tears as if a king had died. Then they slowly circled around behind the coffin and made their way through the opposite side of the double doorway and back outside.

  Man
y men along with the women wept, and without shame. They were descendants from Celts and Vikings. Among people with such blood in their veins, it was honorable to weep for their chiefs, kings, and great men.

  ———

  “I was one o’ the mourners that day,” said Sandy as Loni sat listening. “I was but a yoong man o’ thirty-seven years. I paused beside the still form o’ the auld laird longer than the rest. Though many on the island bore traces o’ Celtic blood, ye ken, along wi’ the Norse, my papa always told me I had Celtic temperament tae the core. I couldna help the tears risin’ in my eyes at the sight o’ him. An’ I let them stream down my face. As a wee laddie I had learned tae love the man, an’ I loved him yet more as a man.”

  80

  The Procession

  A storm blew in that night. It still blustered about the Shetlands on the day of the funeral.

  Perhaps bereavement fares best under gray skies. Chilly winds, with now and then a burst of rain, contributed their share of comforting gloom to the mood of mourning.

  The string of walkers making their way out of the village two days following the viewing at the Cottage, clustered mostly in family groups, were bundled against the day’s weather with overcoats and scarves over black suits and dresses. Every head was covered. A few carried umbrellas.

  Leading the procession, drawn by two Shetland ponies, a carriage bore the body of the leading man of the small clan that made its home on Whales Reef.

  The iron-rimmed wheels clattered rhythmically over cobbles in cadence with the musical clip-clop of the ponies’ hooves. Behind the hearse walked the chief’s widow, sons and daughter with wives and husband and grandchildren, followed by numerous nieces, nephews, cousins, and in-laws.

  After the family, keeping a respectful distance in a long slow-moving train, came the village.

  Conversations were muted and cautious. Even in this modern era, most of these island descendants of Celtic and Viking ancestry were more than a little superstitious about death. It didn’t do to say too much. Someone might be listening.

  Not that anyone was worried about celestial eavesdropping on the part of the man whose body this community of witnesses would soon commit to the ground from whence came all humanity—earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. None on the island harbored a word, nor so much as a thought, against the “lord of the island.” In a time-worn phrase, he was universally beloved by all who knew him—tenants, friends, wife, sons, daughter, as well as those who had chanced to make his acquaintance during the course of his seventy-seven years. All but one—the eldest of his two daughters-in-law.

  The laird himself would have considered it more important that a few present on this day had not only loved him, but also knew him. Among those privileged to both love him and know him were two who had traveled five thousand miles to be here on this day.

  The village undertaker, suitably attired in black tails and top hat, led the carriage off the road and to the right. The faithful ponies followed without need of word or rein, drawing the black-shrouded carriage up the incline toward the church. Reaching their destination, the six men among the family cortege designated for the honor came forward, unloaded the casket, and carried it inside, where the vicar waited solemnly to receive it.

  A brief rupture in the clouds shot a momentary explosion of sunlight from the heavens into the dreary afternoon. For a few seconds the church stood bathed in the glow of eternity.

  Sally Tulloch turned toward it, lifted the black veil from her face, and closed her eyes with a melancholy smile. The sun’s warmth on her cheeks felt like a kiss from the next world.

  As quickly as it had come, the crack in the sky closed. The stones of the church returned to the dull gray of the sky and the sea. Still the rain held off, though the mist hovering in the air grew thick and heavy.

  As of one accord, three generations of Tullochs made their way inside the seventeenth century kirk.

  81

  The Inheritance

  The passing of Ernest Tulloch marked the end of an era. The Auld Laird, as he had endearingly been called, represented one of a shrinking number of links on Whales Reef to the 1800s. He was the last of his bloodline to remember the Victorian decades now imbued with an aura of nostalgia and veneration. Wallace, his second son and inheritor of the title, in spite of his fifty years, was of the new century. He would always be thought of as the Yoong Laird to those who had known his father most of their lives.

  The appellation suggested no lack of esteem for Wallace, who now sat beside his elder brother in the front row of the church. The island’s affection for the new laird might well in time match that for his father. None had complaint about Wallace, other than the occasionally whispered observation that he had married unwisely, that his wife ruled the home rather more than any man should have to endure.

  If a few of the village women harbored skepticism about the future, their doubts generally gathered like a nebulous cloud about the new Lady Priscilla Tulloch who would soon be mistress of the Cottage. The Auld Laird’s widow, however, Lady Sally, ten years younger than her husband and equally beloved, still a handsome and forceful woman of sixty-eight, was certain to keep the shadowy figure of her husband’s daughter-in-law from causing undue mischief in the seat of influence she was rumored to have coveted for decades.

  If Ernest Tulloch’s death raised questions, they could be reduced to the single conundrum on everyone’s lips since news of the will’s content had been announced: Why did Ernest Tulloch split his inheritance?

  The lairdship and the chieftainship had resided on the head of the same man from the first days the island sept had been formed out of the larger Clan Donald in the final decade of the eighteenth century. Driven from the Highlands by the infamous clearances, Ranald MacDonald, second son of the chief of the small Highland sept west of Inverness, had immigrated with a portion of the clan to the Shetlands. There, the new and smaller Whales Reef sept had prospered. By the time Ranald’s son Duncan was chief, he owned most of the island. The clan was by then well-established with a feudal tradition more in keeping with its Highland past than was found on the rest of the Shetlands. Having no sons himself, and to preserve the lairdship and chieftainship on the head of a single male, Duncan willed both property and title to his son-in-law Frederick Tulloch, a native Shetlander. His son, William Tulloch, known as the Great Tulloch, had renamed the clan “Tulloch.” This William was Ernest Tulloch’s father.

  Splitting the titles between Ernest’s two younger sons had created a firestorm of conjecture. The island was talking about nothing else. It was enough that Wallace was not Ernest’s eldest son. That fact alone distinguished the inheritance as unusual. For a second son to inherit, however, was not altogether unheard of. It was a long-established fact that his brother Brogan’s inheritance would be in doubt when he sailed for America twenty-eight years before. Unless he returned, everyone was certain that Wallace would, in Brogan’s stead, inherit the lairdship.

  But for the youngest son, Leith, seven years younger than Wallace at forty-four, to be named chief, the shock waves rocked the island like an earthquake. Once it was public, news of the laird’s will made the front page of Lerwick’s newspaper, and was written up in the mainland’s Northern Scot as well. Did Brogan’s return for the funeral signify more than was apparent on the surface? Might he have come to wrest the inheritance from his brother?

  The only individuals untroubled by the whirlwinds of gossip were the three Tulloch sons. Brogan’s younger brothers, Wallace and Leith, both admitted that they had known of their father’s intentions but had been sworn to strict secrecy. Wallace possessed no ounce of ambition. He was delighted with the prospect of sharing the duties and responsibilities of the family legacy with his younger brother. Lady Sally had probably known of her husband’s plans as well, but she was saying nothing.

  There was one, however, who had definitely not foreseen the startling development. Wallace’s wife, Priscilla, made no attempt to conceal her chagrin
. It was no secret that Ernest had not approved of the marriage in the first place. But Priscilla had cast her spell over Wallace and persuaded him to ignore his father’s objections. Father-in-law and daughter-in-law had endured a precarious relationship of distance ever since.

  Priscilla judged the decision to bestow the two titles separately as a personal slap in her face. Having the stature of her future station so peremptorily undercut from beyond the grave sent her into more than one tirade of fury. She had no intention of sharing the rank of first woman on the island with Leith’s wife. Her disdain for the soft-spoken local lass was sharpened by the knowledge that most on the island loved Moira dearly and had not stopped rejoicing since learning she was the wife of the new chief.

  It was not merely in the matter of the two titles that Ernest’s will enraged his daughter-in-law. His modern sense of fairness would spell the ruin of all she had counted on. Modest legacies in the form of income-producing investments to Brogan, Delynn, and Leith ensured it would be more difficult for her and Wallace to make ends meet from the meager village rents. And his deeding of the Auld Hoose and its adjoining property of one hundred acres to the chief and his posterity shrunk yet further an inheritance that should have belonged to Wallace in its entirety. She had married for money and prestige. Now Ernest had robbed her of both. Rumors were afoot that Priscilla planned to contest Ernest’s will in the courts. There was little she could hope to accomplish, however. Ernest had seen to every legality. The thing was ironclad.

  And now, as the villagers walked quietly up toward the church, more than a handful were looking forward with inward anticipation to see how Lady Priscilla would conduct herself. Would she show respect for the memory of the father-in-law who, in her view, had insulted her and her husband? Would she allow her antagonism to exhibit itself in full public display?

  It was well known that Leith, still in his teens at the time, had been more outspoken than his father in opposition to his brother’s marriage to the young widow from mainland Shetland. But their disagreement over the marriage never came between Ernest and Wallace, nor between the laird’s two sons.