Chapters (43)
- Pronunciation
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Acknowledgments
They had only gone a few feet when he slipped his hand in his pocket to bring out the Saint Christopher medal on its silver chain that Marsaili’s mother had given him a few hours earlier. He passed it to Tormod. “Do you remember this, Mr. Macdonald?” He had to shout above the elemental roar.
Tormod seemed surprised to see it. He stopped and took it from Fin, gazing at it lying in the palm of his hand before making a fist to close around it. Fin was shocked to see sudden tears following the tracks of their predecessors. “She gave it to me,” he said, his voice almost inaudible above the din that crashed around them.
“Who?”
“Ceit.”
Fin thought for a moment. Was Ceit the cause of his unreasonable hatred of Catholics. “And she was a Catholic?”
Tormod looked at him as if he were insane. “Of course. We all were.” He started walking briskly along the line of the outgoing tide, wading through the water as it rushed up the sand, oblivious to it splashing around his legs and soaking his rolled-up trousers. Fin was taken by surprise and it took him several moments to catch him up. This made no sense.
“You were a Catholic?”
Tormod flicked him a dismissive look. “Mass every Sunday in the big church on the hill.”
“At Seilebost?”
“The church the fishermen built. The one with the boat inside it.”
“There was a boat in the church?”
“Beneath the altar.” Tormod stopped as suddenly as he had started, standing ankle-deep in the water that broke against them, and gazed out at the horizon where the dark smudge of a distant tanker broke the line between sea and sky. “You could see Charlie’s beach from up there. Beyond the cemetery. Like a line of silver painted along the shore between the purple of the machair and the turquoise of the sea.” He turned and looked at Fin. “And all the dead in between wanting you to stop on the way. Some human company in the world beyond the grave.”
He turned away again, and before Fin could stop him he had hurled the Saint Christopher medal into the rush of incoming water. It vanished into the swirl of sand and foam, to be sucked out by the undertow and laid to rest somewhere in the deep. Lost for ever.
“No need for papish things now,” he said. “The journey’s nearly over.”
Eighteen
Eighteen