The song peters out but we are all giggling now, buoyed up by the togetherness of the singing. Ali waits a few moments until he has garnered sufficient attention again. “Aye, Bonnie Prince Charlie did indeed speed off to Skye, and then ultimately to France. But the Scotland he left behind was never the same. The Highland clan system was effectively outlawed, and a law was passed making it illegal to own a sword, wear a kilt or in fact wear any tartan at all. Even speaking in Gaelic was forbidden. And those laws were enforced, with gusto: the English were not taking any chances. Even the slightest whiff of rebellion about a man would result in death. Now”—his voice has dropped a little, forcing his audience to lean in—“legend has it that there was a pocket of strong Jacobite resistance right here. The village was smaller then, maybe only a dozen houses, and clustered much nearer the Manse than where it lies the now. When the English soldiers came to wipe it out, all the women and children went into hiding within the kirk—the church, you ken,” he adds for Carrie’s benefit. “The minister, though, was a sniveling, cowardly man. He’d thrown his lot in with the English early on and had been repeatedly preaching to his congregation that they owed obedience to the occupiers. When the soldiers came, the menfolk told them that the women and children had run into the woods to hide, but the minister revealed their true hiding place. For that, they spared him his life and his house. Then the soldiers went to the kirk and demanded that all the sons were sent out to be slaughtered along with their fathers, but the women refused. So the soldiers barred the doors and set light to the kirk.” He looks around his audience. His jerky gaze has calmed, as if the act of storytelling has peeled him back to a quiet strength beneath. “It burned for three days, so unnaturally hot and fierce that nobody could put it out. By the time the fire died out, even the masonry had been reduced to mere rubble.” I’m aware of the background murmur of the bar, but it’s at a distance, as if we are in a bubble, where the only noise that matters is the despairing, terrified screams mixed with the cracking and roaring of the blisteringly hot fire that will not be appeased. “So the minister lived out the rest of his days at the Manse, without a kirk to preach in, for no one would rebuild it. But the spirits of those women and children never forgave him. He was haunted and tormented for the rest of his years. And even after he died, the Manse has continued to be haunted by the women and children who were lost in that fire.”