November 1974

Dearest lambsie, I’m rushing through the years, through my list of things to say, but I don’t know whether I will finish. Time seems thin and wearisome and I have this feeling.

Under the wide and starry sky

Dig the grave and let me lie

Glad did I live and gladly die

And I laid me down with a will …

To think, I’ve been reading Mr Stevenson’s words all my life, and suddenly I understand them.

They used to call the reid-heidit ones fey. Knows more than she ought to, that one—aye, and they didn’t mean it kindly. But it can happen over a long life that you lose your fear of things you just know—you even start to trust that knowing. So I canna ignore this feeling that my time is running low.

There are still some things I’ve not written down, and if I don’t do it soon then they probably never will be told. But there is a reason they are last on a list. How heavy it feels, knowing I must dig up the stones I have buried and look at them again, gather them into the order of things. And then I must roll them on to you.

I am sorry, my Laura-lamb.

17

The well, 1932

People called him a hero, in that strange way they do when they canna bear the senselessness of a thing and need some special word to comfort them, take their minds from the waste. Not Clementina, no. Even in the midst of it all, she was blunt enough to ask: Why? Again and again, insistent. Why? He were just a wee loon an’ it’s not like it were his da an’ he must have known there was no a chance of savin’ him anyways. Why?

To anyone hearing her, it would have seemed cruel—pushing such questions onto the mother of a dead boy, questions that had no answers, the kind that torture you all your days and never do relax their hold. But Clementina had the right, Clementina was there, and for her it was The Madness again. Like that day on the Knab. The furious pumping of blood as she wrenched a body back to the world. Aye, she had the right to demand Why? and it was not an empty question for which there could be no answer. Not for Clementina. She believed there had to be an answer. And that I had to know what it was.

It happened at midday, as Jessie and I were finishing our Saturday morning shift at Mills & Ware. Clementina was in the little haberdashery store in Attfield Street, looking for cheap wool, and forever after she would curse the moments spent chatting with Agnes Davies about knitting patterns from Shetland and the inferior grade of three-ply since the war an’ stupid, stupid things like that.