Sophia's Secret

by Susanna Kearsley

  ‘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.

  Chapter Nine

  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?’

  I couldn’t answer that until I’d laid the background properly, and so I started with the book itself, and how the writing of it was so unlike anything I’d experienced before, and how sometimes it felt that I wasn’t putting it down on paper so much as trying to keep up with it. And I told him how I’d picked Sophia Paterson, my ancestor, to be my viewpoint character. ‘She didn’t come from here,’ I said. ‘She came from near Kirkcudbright, in the west. I only put her in the story because I needed somebody, a woman, who could bind all the historical characters together.’

  Dr Weir, like all good doctors, had sat back to let me talk, not interrupting. But he nodded now to show he understood.

  I carried on, ‘The problem is that some of what I’m writing seems to be more fact than fiction.’ And I gave him, as examples, my correctly guessing Captain Gordon’s first name, and his ship’s name, and the name of Captain Hamilton; and how my own invented floor plan of the castle rooms had so exactly matched the one he’d given me. I told him, too, about my walk along the coast path yesterday – although I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t been alone, I only told him of my sense that I had made that walk before.

  ‘And that’s OK,’ I said, ‘because I know there’s probably a simple explanation for it all. I’ve done a lot of research for this book. I’ve likely read those details somewhere, and seen photographs, and now I’m just recalling things that I forgot I knew. But…’ How did I say this, I wondered, without sounding crazy? ‘But some of the things that I’ve written are details I couldn’t have possibly read somewhere else. Things I couldn’t have known.’ I explained about Sophia’s birthdate, the death of her father, his will that had given the name of her uncle. ‘My father only found those dates, those documents, because I told him where to look. Except I don’t know how I knew to look there. It’s as if…’ I stopped again, and searched for words, and then, because there wasn’t anything to do but take a breath and dive right in, I said, ‘My father always says I like the sea so much because it’s in my blood, because our ancestors were shipbuilders from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He doesn’t mean it literally, but given what’s been happening to me I wondered if you knew if there was such a thing,’ I asked him, ‘as genetic memory?’ His eyes, behind the spectacles, grew thoughtful.

  ‘Could you have Sophia’s memories, do you mean?’

  ‘Yes. Is it possible?’

  ‘It’s interesting.’ He gave it that, and for a moment he was silent, thinking. Then he told me, ‘Memory is a thing that science doesn’t fully understand, at present. We don’t even properly know how a memory is formed, or when our memories start – at birth, or in the womb, or if, as you suggest, we humans carry memory in our genes. Jungian psychologists would argue, in a broader sense, that such a thing exists; that some of us share knowledge that is based, not on experience, but on the learnings of our common ancestors. A sort of deep instinct,’ he said, ‘or what Jung liked to call the “collective unconscious”.’

  ‘I’ve heard the term.’

  ‘It’s still a controversial theory, though it might, to some degree, explain the actions of some primates, chimpanzees, who, even after being raised in isolation from their families so they couldn’t have learnt anything directly, still showed knowledge that the researchers could not explain – the way to use a rock to open nuts for food, and such like. But then, a good part of Jung’s theories can’t be tested. His idea that our common human wariness of heights, for instance, might have been passed down to us from some poor, luckless prehistoric man who took a tumble off a cliff and lived to learn the lesson of it. Pure conjecture,’ he pronounced. ‘And besides, the “collective unconscious” idea is not about people recalling specific events.’

  ‘These are pretty specific,’ I said.

  ‘So I gather.’ He gave me another look, closely assessing, as though I were one of his patients. ‘If it were only déjà-vu, I’d have you in to see a specialist tomorrow. Déjà-vu can be a side effect of certain kinds of epilepsy, or more rarely of a lesion on the brain. But this, from what you’ve said, is something more. When did this start?’

  I considered the question. ‘I think when I first saw the castle.’

  ‘That’s interesting.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, you said that your ancestor came from the west coast of Scotland.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So it’s unlikely she ever saw Slains.’

  ‘Well, we know she was born near Kirkcudbright. We know she was married there. People in those days just didn’t go traipsing all over the country.’

  ‘Aye, true enough. So it may not be memory, after all. How could you have her memories of Slains,’ he said, ‘if she was never here?’

  I had no answer to that question, and I’d come no closer to one by the time I left, a little dazed, less from our talk than from the fact that I’d drunk whisky before noon.

  I nearly walked past Jimmy Keith, just coming out of his front door, no doubt on his way to his daily lunch at the St Olaf Hotel.

  ‘Aye-aye,’ was his cheerful greeting. ‘Foo are ye the day?’

  I didn’t know exactly how I was, but I told him, ‘Fine, thank you,’ and we passed a bit of small talk back and forth about the weather, which was grey and dismal.

  ‘Ye’ll be needing yer electric meter emptied. I’ve nae done it yet this week.’

  I had forgotten. ‘Yes, I’m nearly out of coins.’

  ‘I’ll come along and dee it noo. Ye dinna wish tae find yerself on such a day as this, athoot the lichts.’

  I glanced at him from time to time as we walked up Ward Hill, and tried to think which of his sons was most like him. Stuart, I thought, had his straight nose and effortless charm, whereas Graham had more of the roughness, the strength of his build and the roll of his walk. Strange, I thought, how genetics worked – how one man could pass on such diverse traits to his children.

  It was clear, though, that neither one of them had taught their father how to make the meter over my door run without the key. Inside, he emptied out the coins and gave them back to me, and I in turn fished out a ten pound note and thanked him.

  ‘Ach, nae bother.’ He looked round. ‘Ye’re getting on a’richt, are ye?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’ Past him, through the window of my front room, I could see the sprawl of Slains toward
s the north. I pulled my gaze away, deliberately avoiding it. It wasn’t that I wanted to escape the book, exactly, but the things that had been happening these past few days had left me feeling overwhelmed, and desperately in need of a diversion. On impulse I said, ‘Jimmy?’

  ‘Aye?’

  ‘I might be away for a few days.’

  ‘Oh, aye? Far would ye be awa til?’

  Where would I be away to? Good question. ‘To Edinburgh, maybe. There’s some research for the book I need to do.’

  ‘Ye’ll be hame at the wikkend, then, will ye?’

  I thought of the driving tour I had been promised on Saturday, and answered with certainty, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because Graham, my ither loon, said he’d be up at the wikkend, and I thocht ye’d want tae meet him. He’s a lecturer in history, like I telt ye, and I doot that he’ll ken somethin aboot Slains that’ll be o use tae ye.’

  My first reaction was surprise that Graham hadn’t mentioned that he’d met me, but I tried my best to hide that. He’d doubtless had his reasons.

  Jimmy, unaware, said, ‘I was thinking ye micht want tae come fer lunch on Sunday. Nothing fancy, mind ye. I can roast a bit o beef fin I’m in luck, but I’ll nae promise mair than that.’

  It was impossible to say no to his smile. I said, ‘I’ll be there.’

  Truth was, I wouldn’t have been likely, anyway, to say no to a chance to spend a bit more time with Graham. But I didn’t tell his father that.

  ‘Aweel,’ said Jimmy, pleased, ‘g’awa tae Edinburgh finever ye like, quine, and nivver fash. I’ll keep the cottage snod, and yer lum rikkin.’ Then he caught himself, as though he’d just remembered I was not a local, and started to rephrase that, but I stopped him.

  ‘No, it’s all right, I got all of that. I understand.’

  ‘Oh aye? Fit did I tell ye, noo?’

  ‘You told me not to worry, that you’d keep the cottage in good order and my chimney smoking.’

  Jimmy grinned. ‘Michty, ye’ve a rare grasp o the Doric fer a quine fa’s nivver heard it afore.’