I was a younger man…

I promised I would tell the story as I felt it should be told, and if you’ve read this closely you will find I’ve sought to tell the truth.

My study is a quiet room, but these past days it has seemed lively with the ghosts of those long gone, who’ve wished to come and visit me—Captain Gordon, always with a gift tucked in his pocket and his coat well brushed, and Walter, with his dreams and hopes and arguments, and when the evening’s drawing in, my mother, Barbara, with her lovely face and eyes that find mine in the firelight.

These shades, and others, have been welcome visitors of late, and yet no human guests could have been more demanding.

“Tell them this,” they’ve seemed to say, or “you can surely not forget that part.” And so I’ve labored on, to write the whole of Lily’s tale, and mine, that you may judge the truth of it against the rumors that still rise.

Two of these phantoms in my study have been strangers—Colonel Graeme and his son—although I met the colonel long ago, when as a lad I was imprisoned in the Tolbooth. He showed kindness to me then. He gave a blanket to me, and advised me I would walk a better road if I kept better company. I have imagined that his son would have the same kind eyes.

In my life, the thing I most regret is leaving Lily on the pier that day in Leith. I should have stayed. I should have listened to her, trusted her, and not let my own feelings of inadequacy blind me to the truth that she would never have betrayed me with another man—but when I saw her standing with James Graeme by the windmill, after what I’d seen the day before, and Lily saying she no longer wished for us to marry right away, I thought the worst, and…well, that is not true. I did not think at all. I acted purely out of pain, and impulse.

Though she has forgiven me, I know that my apology could not erase the moment, nor the harm it caused, and I have had to live with that.

But I regret, too, that by leaving then, I lost the chance to meet James Graeme, who’d been so important in her life—a man I would have liked. A man I would have counted myself fortunate to know.

So it has been a pleasure, and a kind of benediction, to have had the chance to meet him in the writing of this tale. And in the evenings when I sit beside my fire, my whisky in my hand, my thoughts drifting, I have found it easy, if I change the angle of my head and let my eyes half close, to picture Jamie sitting in the chair that faces mine, an old companion—as he might indeed have been, had he but lived.

But those are shades.

Beside that chair right now, the cat is lying with her kittens in her basket. It seems only yesterday they were too small and helpless to do anything without her, but today they’re tumbling out onto the carpet. Henry’s granddaughter will be beside herself when she does come to visit us with all the family at the weekend, from Cross Harbor.