Dearest lambsie, your postcard just arrived. That beautiful mountain, with its crown of snow. Snow! All these years, but if I lived to be a hundred or more, never would I forget the touch of snow, what it feels like falling on the palms of your hands. I am glad to remember that. Glad you have made me remember. But there are other things, I remember them too.

And so I’ve closed the slatted window on the autumn sun, on the smell of rosemary and sweet alyssum. I’ve brought out my notebook again.

This is the last thing I will write for you, my lambsie. The last thing on my list, the thing I promised. I’ve not told the story to anyone before—not your mother, no, nor Clementina. Not even Magnus Tulloch knew. I was too ashamed at first to tell him and then … well, it was one more thing, and there seemed already too many.

Is it right to speak of it now, after all this time? I have been thinking on this a long while, and still I don’t know. Kathryn has never been one for looking back, and Clementina has told me plain to leave the dead where they canna hurt the living. Finished, done, gone. Perhaps it’s true there are some things should never be told, that nought is to be gained by passing them on. Better they die like memory does—held for a time and then let to become ash. Cast on the water, or to the wind, or returned to the earth.

No, I just don’t know.

You can decide, lambsie, whether to turn this page and read. But if you have come this far on the journey with me, I canna imagine you will do that. So it is down to me, after all, for good or ill.

I am sorry, my lambsie.

Brukie’s Sandy

Brukie’s Sandy

April 1905—only seventy years ago. It might as well be two hundred or more. That’s how it seems when I look back now, like it was a darker century, a primitive time. But in 1905 that small village was edging closer to the bewildering world, thrust into change after centuries of none. Those old ways, all those old beliefs, stirred together with a pinch of God to keep the frown from the pastor’s face.

That boy, that Brukie’s Sandy, he wasn’t like other boys, no. People called him simple. Or blessed of God. ‘A great lumpin’ gapus,’ my brothers used to say. He loved Kitta, he did. She was kind to him, gentle, and he worshipped her for it. Pretty Kitty—that’s what he called her.

But you know all this, lambsie, of course you do. I’ve told you before, aye. What I haven’t told you is what else that boy loved.