“Is everything in there to do with the Manse?”

“I think so.”

“Do you have any more photos?” asks Callum, clearly much less interested in the jotters. I look around for the aerial shots of the Manse and hand them to him. “Cool!”

I inspect the jotter I’m holding again; one could buy something like it in any newsagent’s. It’s about two thirds full of decisive handwriting, with a slight flourish to the cross of the t’s. My father wrote this, I think. This, and this, and this. He sat at a table, somewhere in this house, and he set down his thoughts. Not in Biro, in fountain pen, and in the same blue ink. Did he always write in fountain pen? Or was that choice a mark of his investment in the project? “Your grandfather told me that my father was researching the Manse’s history. I think we’ve found his research.” I sink into a chair and read a page at random. Pre-1841, the census report was statistical only. In 1841, the Manse is listed with John Buchanan (41), Mary Buchanan (32) and Christine Anderson (16) in residence.

I flick through, looking for something relating to an earlier period, to the period of Ali’s story. From his notes, it looks like my father had heard that story and was looking for that, too: there’s various expressions of frustration in that decisive blue handwriting that he can’t find any records naming householders from before the 1800s. The Jacobite rebellion was 1745, and Bonnie Prince Charlie died in 1788. Any pockets of Jacobite rebellion would have died out well before the 1841 census.

“What’s this?” Callum asks, pointing near the shore of the loch on one photo.

“Oh, that’s a path, surely.” The line he’s indicating is paler than the green around it.

“But there isn’t a path there.”

“Well, there might have been one back then. These must have been taken almost thirty years ago.” I look at it again. It seems an odd-shaped path, like a tick mark, leading away from the shore at a forty-five-degree angle for a short distance, perhaps only meters, and then turning a right angle to head back toward the shore. But perhaps the shore line has changed over that time too.

“Can I go play?”

“Of course.” I follow his dark head out of the room with my eyes, marveling at his comfort here. He seems entirely at ease, more so than I for all this was my own childhood home. And the Manse seems at ease with him.