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Entry Island(126)

By:Peter May


‘Oh, good Lord, no!’ She almost laughed. ‘I couldn’t afford to, even if I had somewhere to hang them.’ Her smile faded, and there was the strangest, most awkward silence between us. And suddenly she said, ‘Why did you come to Canada?’

I was quite taken aback by her directness, but answered her unexpected question honestly. ‘Because my village on the Isle of Lewis and Harris was cleared by its landlord. I had no choice.’

‘And where did you sail from?’

I frowned now, becoming a little irritated by her questions. But I remained polite. ‘Glasgow,’ I said.

She looked at me very directly. ‘Aboard the Eliza?’

Now I was astonished. ‘Well, yes. But how could you possibly know that? You would have been no more than a baby at the time.’

Her smile seemed to me tinged with sadness. ‘That’s exactly what I was,’ she said. ‘Delivered aboard the Eliza by a Highlander who knew how to recover a baby from the breech position.’

I swear that my heart stopped beating for a full minute.

‘A man who gave me my life,’ she said. ‘I had always known that his name was Sime Mackenzie.’ Her eyes never left mine for one moment. ‘I first heard about you, maybe three years ago. An article in the newspaper. And I’d always wondered, but never dared hope until now that you would be that man.’

I had no idea what to say. A million emotions clouded my thinking, but all I wanted to do was hold her in my arms, as I had done on the Eliza all those years before. Of course, I didn’t. I just stood there like an idiot.

‘The family who raised me gave me their surname, Mackinnon. And the Christian name of my mother.’

‘Catrìona,’ the name slipped from my lips in a whisper.

‘I wanted to give you this,’ she said.

And she took out a gold signet ring with an arm and sword engraved in red carnelian. I could hardly believe my eyes. The ring that Ciorstaidh had given me on the quay in Glasgow the day that I lost her. And along with the cash borrowed from Michaél, the ring that I had given to the Mackinnon family into whose care I left the baby at Grosse Île. The only thing of any value that I possessed. My last link to Ciorstaidh, and the greatest sacrifice I could have made.

‘I suppose it must have been worth a small fortune,’ Catrìona said. ‘But they never sold it. Couldn’t bring themselves to do it. The money you gave them helped them on their way to a new life, and I grew up with this ring on a chain around my neck.’ She held it out to me. ‘I’m giving it back to you now as a thank you for the gift of life that you gave me.’





CHAPTER FORTY


Sime was in shock. Tears bubbled up quite involuntarily and blurred his ancestor’s handwriting.

He’d had no recollection, from his grandmother’s reading of the diaries, of Ciorstaidh giving Simon a ring in Glasgow, or of his ancestor parting with it on Grosse Île to help pay for the baby’s keep. As Annie had said, if he’d known how the story completed a circle, that the ring had come back to him in the end, then its significance would surely never have been lost to his memory.

He looked at his hand in front of him on the desk, that very ring shining in the light. He ran the tip of a finger lightly over the engraving of the arm and sword. How could he ever have imagined what history this simple inanimate object had witnessed? How carelessly had he worn it all these years without the least idea of its significance?

He stood up and crossed to the bed and sat down to open and search back through the diaries until he found what he was looking for. And there it was, finally. His ancestor’s account of losing Ciorstaidh on the quay, just as he had dreamt it. Except for the gift of the ring she had given him in the moments before their separation. A family heirloom that she had taken in case they needed something to sell. Part of a matching set, including a pendant that hung around her neck.

He searched through the following journals until he found the moment on Grosse Île when his ancestor had given the Mackinnons the ring. Almost as an afterthought. Guilty that the sacrifice had been Michaél’s and not his. Sime had not remembered that at all. Then, as he flicked through the pages in front of him, he realised that they were full of detail he did not recall from his granny’s reading. Maybe she had paraphrased or edited as she had read. And he knew that someday soon he was going to have to sit down and read them all through from beginning to end. After all, this was his story, too. His history.

Suddenly it occurred to him that he had no idea what had happened to Michaél. Was that the story his parents had not wanted their grandmother to read them? But he would look for it later. There were just two short entries left in the final diary, and he took it back to the desk to settle down in the pool of light and read them.