The Winter Sea

The weather was thawing in earnest, and the breeze was almost mild against my face as I stepped back to let another woman pass me, her wheeled suitcase rumbling purposefully across the paving bricks

‘Carrie!’

I shifted the weight of my own case and took a look round. I’d never actually met Ross McClelland, but over the years I’d formed a mental picture of him, making him in my own mind an older version of my father, someone I’d recognize, seeing as we had all sprung from the same stock. The man who came forward to greet me was nothing like what I’d imagined he’d be. He was big and tall and ruddy-faced, with thick wavy hair and a beard that, though grey, still showed black round the edges. I wouldn’t have known him for family.

He’d recognized me, though.

‘Oh, aye, my wife buys all your books,’ he said. ‘You look just like your photo on the jacket flap. Is this all you brought?’

‘Yes. How is your wife?’ I asked him, as he took my suitcase from my hand and led me out towards the parking area.

‘A wee bit better. It’s her gout, you see. She has attacks of it so fierce these days she finds it hard to move, but she’s been out of bed this morning and her sister’s come to sit with her awhile, so that’s all right.’

I hadn’t taken Ross up on his offer of a place to stay. I’d known that he would offer when I phoned him up last Sunday, but I’d also known his wife had not been well, and that they didn’t need the added burden of a house guest—especially one who would be staying up till all hours writing, wandering round when everybody else was fast asleep, and lying late in bed. So I had booked myself a room at a hotel, and although Ross had raised a protest, I had sensed he was relieved.

Just as I sensed now, from the way that he was chatting to me while he put my suitcase in the car and saw me safely buckled in, that he was pleased to have the chance to leave his nursemaid duties for a day, and spend a bit of time with someone else who shared his love of genealogy.

He’d promised me a proper tour, and that was what I got.

It was a lovely drive from Dumfries, down through countryside that rolled with hills of green and darker forests, and the trees in places arching overhead to make the road seem like a tunnel. There were sheep, and curiously banded black-and-white Galloway cattle, and when we made our first stop at a little country kirkyard we were greeted by a lively burst of birdsong.

‘There you are,’ said Ross, and pointed to a small and tilting headstone. ‘That’s your Anna Mary Paterson.’

I knelt to take a closer look. The stone was crusted thick with lichen, and the passing years had worn the words away till they were barely there at all.

Ross said, ‘It was a bit of luck, my finding that. You don’t find many stones that age, and those you do find often are past reading.’

He was right, I knew. But still, I had a feeling that I might have found this grave myself, if I had tried. The kirkyard faintly stirred my memory. Standing up again, I looked across the fields and saw a dark place near the distant trees that made me feel as cold as if I’d stepped into a shadow. ‘Did there used to be a house once, over there?’

Ross couldn’t tell me, but I felt sure that if I ever had the luck to come across an old map of this area, I’d find a cottage sitting on that spot—John Drummond’s cottage. It was fitting, in my mind, that time had claimed those stones as well, and left no mark behind of all the evil that had happened there.

I touched Sophia’s sister’s headstone gently, and felt closure.

Our next stop was a field as well. ‘See over there?’ asked Ross, and pointed to a level place along the river shore. ‘Your ancestor and mine, old Hugh Maclellan, had a farm there. That was where his sons were born and where he died, before they both were sent across to live in Ireland among the Ulster Scots.’

I knew the story. David John McClelland—when and why they’d changed the spelling of the name, we didn’t know—had gone to Ireland with his brother William, and we’d lost their trails until they’d both returned to marry wives in Scotland. William had found his wife first, and in what must have been a disappointment to the Scottish settlers in Ireland, had stayed on in Kirkcudbright. Not for long, though. He had died a young man, leaving only one son to survive him and to carry on the family line that Ross became a part of.

‘Would you like to see the house that William lived in, after he came back from Ireland?’

It wasn’t my branch of the family tree, but Ross seemed so pleased to have me there for company that I said yes, of course I would, and so we drove the short way down into Kirkcudbright.

It was one of the prettiest places I’d been to, its houses built shoulder to shoulder and painted soft yellow and grey, pink and blue—some whitewashed, some left plain of red stone or of dark stone, with their neatly painted window frames and tidy iron railings and the chimneys with their little rows of chimney pots.

The High Street was unusual in that it was an L-shape and, though I could see a few shops and commercial establishments, it seemed to otherwise be almost all residential.

‘Aye, it’s always been like that,’ said Ross. He drove us past the ancient Tollbooth with its pointed high roof tower, round the corner where the narrow street grew narrower from all the cars parked end to end along it, and he found a space to park his car among them, and we both got out.

The house in question was a stone-built, square-walled building huddled close against its neighbors, with a bright green-painted door and windows that were open to the warming air of spring.