Sophia's Secret

by Susanna Kearsley

  He’d recognised me, though.

  ‘Oh, aye, my wife buys all your books,’ he said. ‘You look just like your photo on the jacket flap. Is this all you brought?’

  ‘Yes. How is your wife?’ I asked him, as he took my suitcase from my hand and led me out towards the parking area.

  ‘A wee bit better. It’s her gout, you see. She has attacks of it so fierce these days she finds it hard to move, but she’s been out of bed this morning and her sister’s come to sit with her awhile, so that’s all right.’

  I hadn’t taken Ross up on his offer of a place to stay. I’d known that he would offer when I phoned him up last Sunday, but I’d also known his wife had not been well, and that they didn’t need the added burden of a house guest – especially one who would be staying up till all hours writing, wandering round when everybody else was fast asleep, and lying late in bed. So I had booked myself a room at a hotel, and although Ross had raised a protest, I had sensed he was relieved.

  Just as I sensed now, from the way that he was chatting to me while he put my suitcase in the car and saw me safely buckled in, that he was pleased to have the chance to leave his nursemaid duties for a day, and spend a bit of time with someone else who shared his love of genealogy.

  He’d promised me a proper tour, and that was what I got.

  It was a lovely drive from Dumfries, down through countryside that rolled with hills of green and darker forests, and the trees in places arching overhead to make the road seem like a tunnel. There were sheep, and curiously banded black-and white Galloway cattle, and when we made our first stop at a little country kirkyard we were greeted by a lively burst of birdsong.

  ‘There you are,’ said Ross, and pointed to a small and tilting headstone. ‘That’s your Anna Mary Paterson.’

  I knelt to take a closer look. The stone was crusted thick with lichen, and the passing years had worn the words away till they were barely there at all.

  Ross said, ‘It was a bit of luck, my finding that. You don’t find many stones that age, and those you do find often are past reading.’

  He was right, I knew. But still, I had a feeling that I might have found this grave myself, if I had tried. The kirkyard faintly stirred my memory. Standing up again, I looked across the fields and saw a dark place near the distant trees that made me feel as cold as if I’d stepped into a shadow. ‘Did there used to be a house once, over there?’

  Ross couldn’t tell me, but I felt sure that if I ever had the luck to come across an old map of this area, I’d find a cottage sitting on that spot – John Drummond’s cottage. It was fitting, in my mind, that time had claimed those stones as well, and left no mark behind of all the evil that had happened there.

  I touched Sophia’s sister’s headstone gently, and felt closure.

  Our next stop was a field as well. ‘See over there?’ asked Ross, and pointed to a level place along the river shore. ‘Your ancestor and mine, old Hugh MacLellan, had a farm there. That was where his sons were born and where he died, before they both were sent across to live in Ireland among the Ulster Scots.’

  I knew the story. David John McClelland – when and why they’d changed the spelling of the name, we didn’t know – had gone to Ireland with his brother William, and we’d lost their trails until they’d both returned to marry wives in Scotland. William had found his wife first, and in what must have been a disappointment to the Scottish settlers in Ireland, had stayed on in Kirkcudbright. Not for long, though. He had died a young man, leaving only one son to survive him and to carry on the family line that Ross became a part of.

  ‘Would you like to see the house that William lived in, after he came back from Ireland?’

  It wasn’t my branch of the family tree, but Ross seemed so pleased to have me there for company that I said yes, of course I would, and so we drove the short way down into Kirkcudbright.

  It was one of the prettiest places I’d been to, its houses built shoulder to shoulder and painted soft yellow and grey, pink and blue – some whitewashed, some left plain of red stone or of dark stone, with their neatly painted window frames and tidy iron railings and the chimneys with their little rows of chimney pots.

  The High Street was unusual in that it was an L-shape and, though I could see a few shops and commercial establishments, it seemed to otherwise be almost all residential.

  ‘Aye, it’s always been like that,’ said Ross. He drove us past the ancient Tollbooth with its pointed high roof tower, round the corner where the narrow street grew narrower from all the cars parked end to end along it, and he found a space to park his car among them, and we both got out.

  The house in question was a stone-built, square-walled building huddled close against its neighbours, with a bright green-painted door and windows that were open to the warming air of spring.

  Ross looked it over. ‘Now, I can’t be certain, mind you, but from letters that I’ve found describing where his house was situated, this is where I think he lived. A shame you didn’t come here last year, I’d have taken you inside – it was a bed and breakfast then. But it’s been bought up by a lad from Glasgow. Artist. Lots of artists live here now.’

  I stopped. A breeze blew past, and something stirred. Enough to make me take my camera out, and snap off a few pictures of the street, the door, the windows…that far window, in particular. I said, to Ross, ‘I’m guessing David McClelland was here, too, at one time.’

  ‘Aye, it’s possible.’

  It was a little more than that, I thought. And it was one of my regrets that, in the moment before Ross resumed our tour, I didn’t just step up and knock at that green door and ask the artist lad from Glasgow for a tour of his front rooms, and of the room in the far corner where the window seemed to watch me like a gently knowing eye.

  I was restless that night.

  I had wanted to treat Ross to supper, to thank him for taking me round, but he’d cheerfully waved off my offer. ‘No, no, there’s no need for that. The wife’s sister will be watching the door as it is, I’ve been gone so long. But,’ he’d said, ‘it was a pleasure, my dear, to have met you.’

  Our handshake had easily turned to a hug.

  ‘Oh,’ he’d said, drawing back so he could search his coat pockets, ‘I nearly forgot. I was meaning to give you a catalogue.’

  ‘Catalogue?’

  ‘Aye, for the auction. I’ve sent one last week to your father, but I thought you might like to have one yourself. It’s the New York McClellands,’ he’d said. ‘Tom and Clare.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Tom was my Dad’s distant cousin, and traced his line back, as did we, to Sophia and David. Somehow or other his side of the family had managed to gain possession of most of the family’s historical keepsakes – our family Bible being the only notable exception – and Tom and his wife had a habit of blithely disposing of things to help fund their extravagant lifestyle, which left my dad fuming since often we didn’t find out until after the sale.

  I’d looked at the catalogue cover to see what the date of the auction was – next Friday – and Ross had said, ‘Oh aye, I got that away in the post to your father as soon as I opened the envelope. Tom’s done this so many times now I’ve had to get one step ahead of him, so I set up an arrangement,’ he’d said, ‘with the auction house. Any time they take in something to do with McClellands, they send me their catalogues.’

  ‘Clever.’ I’d smiled. ‘I’m surprised Tom and Clare still have things left to sell. I’d have thought they’d cleared everything out by now.’

  ‘Oh, there’s not much this time. Only a table or two and some jewellery. But still, I thought you and your father would like to at least see the pictures.’

  I’d thanked him, and tucked it away in my bag.

  After supper, I’d gone for a walk and had sat for an hour on a bench at the back of the Greyfriars Church by the harbour. It wasn’t the kind of a harbour I’d thought it would be, after all that I’d read in the history books. Centuries ago the great Scottish patriot
William Wallace had supposedly sailed from here after his failure at Falkirk, fleeing to the safety of the continent, and his arch-nemesis, the English King Edward I, had once landed his fleet of some sixty-odd ships in Kirkcudbright, so in my own mind I had pictured a harbour like those of the towns on the coast, but this hadn’t been like that. There had been little more than the river itself, with a wall at its edge where the boats could be moored. And at low tide those boats would be sitting on mudbanks, and anything larger would have to wait out in the river’s deep middle, at anchor.

  But still, when I’d squinted, I hadn’t had trouble imagining ships sailing past, coming in from the sea to seek shelter and unload their cargoes. The town would have changed since that time. The power plant off to my right and the bridge arching over the bend in the river would not have been there, but when I’d filtered out all that, I’d felt I might be seeing what Sophia would have seen had she been sitting in that spot beneath the trees three hundred years ago, and looking out across the River Dee. The farther shore was still and peaceful, with its green hills rising gently through the deeper green of woods above a white farm and a small boat sailing past upon the tide.

  I hadn’t been so certain of the church behind me – Ross had told me it had been rebuilt at some time in the eighteenth century, and was not the original – but I’d been sure the castle that stood even taller behind that was something that Sophia would have known. MacLellan’s Castle, named for my own family, though we hadn’t yet established any link on paper between our McClellands and the man who’d built the castle. It had suffered, as had Slains, the great indignity of having had its roof removed, and so had fallen into ruin. Even so, considering MacLellan’s Castle’s roof had been removed almost two hundred years before the one at Slains, it had seemed to be bearing up wonderfully well.

  Ross had shown me around it as part of our tour, and we’d walked round the outside on tidy gravel pathways edged by neatly clipped sections of lawn and new-flowering borders so that he could show me the armorial engravings chiselled over the front doorway. I confess I’d paid little attention except to the fact that the arms had been those of the laird and his second wife, with whom he’d apparently been very happy, and that had started me thinking about second marriages.

  And that, I knew, was at the core of my problem.

  I needed Sophia to marry again as she’d done in real life, but I couldn’t see how she’d be happy with anyone other than John, and my fear was that once I got into the writing, I’d find that she hadn’t been happy – that she’d only married my ancestor for the security, or to get out of Kirkcudbright, or for some other practical reason. And once I had written the scene, I’d be stuck with it. I couldn’t change what had actually happened, not even to satisfy Jane’s desire for a happy ending.

  It wouldn’t ring true.

  That was why I was restlessly pacing my room now, unable to focus enough to just sit down and write.

  I’d never had writer’s block, but sometimes when I was approaching a scene that I didn’t want to deal with I had trouble getting on with it, and pairing Sophia with David McClelland would be, in some ways, even harder than killing off Moray. My subconscious sensed what was coming and shrank from the task, finding any excuse not to work.

  A part of me wanted to just pull the plug on my laptop and go straight to bed and forget the whole thing, and I might have, except at that moment Sophia’s voice started to form in my mind, her words faint but insistent.

  She’d said them before, when she’d spoken to Kirsty before leaving Slains. And though, when she had said them, she’d been speaking of her childhood, I believed that in this room, here in this place, her words meant more than that. I felt them like a nudge at my shoulder, encouraging me to go on.

  I did not suffer in Kirkcudbright, she reminded me.

  And what else could I do, I thought, but take her at her word?

  XXII

  After the first month Sophia had stopped trying to keep track of days, they were so much alike – all filled with prayer and quiet work and sober conversation. Only Sundays stood out from the rest, for she had found them quite exhausting when she’d first arrived among the Presbyterians: up early and to prayers, and then to kirk at ten, and briefly home to eat a meagre meal of bread and egg before returning to the kirk at two, and sitting through the sermons all the afternoon, by which time she was far too tired to enjoy the supper that was served at night, or take full part in all the evening prayers and singing that were yet to follow before she could take herself upstairs to bed.

  The Countess of Erroll, while a woman of devotion, had kept Sundays in the manner of a true Episcopalian – a morning service followed by a midday meal that made the table groan and had left everyone quite lazy and content to spend the leavings of the day in happy idleness.

  It was on Sundays that Sophia missed her life at Slains the most, and though the people of this house where she was living now – the Kerrs – had been most kind to her, and welcoming, she felt a certain sadness on a Sunday. Although she tried to hide it, her feelings must have showed upon her face as she sat now among the family while they ate their cold noon meal, for Mrs Kerr had long been watching her and finally said, ‘Sophia, I do fear that you must find us very dreary, after living in the north. I have been told the Earl of Erroll and his mother keep a lively house.’

  Sophia liked Mrs Kerr, a soft-faced woman younger by some ten years than her husband. Mr Kerr, a man of mild temperament and pleasant manners, had a sombre air about him that had not yet fully claimed his wife, so she was more inclined to smile. Not like her husband’s mother, Mrs Kerr the elder, who although she had displayed at times a cutting wit, still turned a disapproving face toward the world in general.

  The older woman said, not looking up, ‘I should imagine Mistress Paterson, like any decent woman, would be relishing the quiet after suffering the company of such a house as Slains.’

  Her son said, ‘Mother.’

  ‘Do not “Mother” me, my lad. You know full well what my opinion is of all this foolish talk of bringing back the king, and what I think of those who entertain the notion, and that does include yourself,’ she told him, with a sidelong glance that put him in his place. ‘You mark my words, he may now promise us that he’ll not interfere in our religion, but the instant he sets foot on Scottish soil you’ll hear him pipe a different tune. He is a papist, and you cannot trust a papist.’

  Mr Kerr remarked that he would sooner trust a papist than an Englishman.

  ‘On your head be it, then,’ his mother said, and turning in her seat she asked Sophia, ‘What is your opinion, Mistress Paterson?’

  But Sophia had been living here three months, and knew enough to step around the trap. ‘I am afraid I have not met that many papists. And no Englishmen at all.’

  The elder Mrs Kerr could not contain a quirking of her mouth that spoilt her dour expression for an instant. ‘Aye, well then you have been fortunate.’ Her study of Sophia held new interest. ‘Tell me, how is it you came to be at Slains? The Duchess of Gordon has told us your family did come from this place, and that you had been brought up not far from Kirkcudbright. What took you so far from your home?’

  ‘I am kin to the Countess of Erroll.’ She said it with pride, and for all of her weariness sat a bit straighter. ‘I went there at her invitation.’

  ‘I see. And what made you come back?’

  There it was, that sharp twist at her heart that was now so familiar she’d learnt to breathe through it. She spoke the lie lightly, ‘I thought I had stayed long enough in the north.’

  Mr Kerr nodded. ‘I seem to remember the Duchess of Gordon did say you were keen to come back to the place of your birth.’

  Young Mrs Kerr was thinking. ‘Is the duchess not a papist?’

  ‘The Duchess of Gordon,’ her mother-in-law said firmly, ‘is a woman quite above the common mark, who at her heart I am convinced is Presbyterian.’

  Sophia had heard much about the duchess
since she’d come here. Colonel Hooke, as she recalled, had spoken much about his correspondence with the duchess, who despite her Catholic faith had gained the trust and high regard of the great chieftains of the Western Shires, those fervent Presbyterians who had been just as outraged by the Union as the Jacobites, and who had sought to join their forces in a fight to guard the Scottish crown against the English. From her Edinburgh home she served as a go-between, fully aware she was narrowly watched by the agents of Queen Anne and by the less visible spies of the Duke of Hamilton.

  The duke, Sophia had learnt, was distrusted as much by the Presbyterians as by the Jacobites, since it was he who had stopped them from rising in protest of the Union when it might have done some good. She’d also been told he had sent a private envoy once to tell the western chieftains they would better serve themselves by giving him the crown in place of James, since he alone could guard their interests. But they would not undertake such treason, and had earned the duke’s fierce enmity.

  The rumour was he regularly turned his eye toward the west, and that his spies yet walked among the people of this shire, but he would dare not make a move here, with the people so against him. Sophia knew that, in Kirkcudbright, she was safe. And anyway, with Moray dead, she’d be of little value to the duke.

  Mr Kerr, at the head of the table, was slicing the meat for the next course when young Mrs Kerr changed the subject.

  ‘Did you see the widow McClelland in kirk? She has put off her mourning.’

  Her husband shrugged. ‘Aye, well ’tis almost a year now.’

  His wife replied, ‘I should not doubt that it has more to do with the arrival of her husband’s brother. He was not in kirk this morning.’

  Mr Kerr remarked he would not know the man to see him. ‘I am told he is not well.’

  Sophia knew that Mr Kerr was trying not to let the conversation dwindle into gossip, but it was no use. His wife had that peculiar light of interest in her eyes that people got when they were speaking of the actions of another.