The Winter Sea

The IGI, or International Genealogical Index, was one of the most useful tools for family history searchers. It was created and maintained by the Church of Latter Day Saints, whose members went worldwide to search out every single register of marriages and births in every church that they could find. They put the pages of those registers on microfilm, transcribed them, and then indexed them. And now, with the arrival of the internet, the indexes were easier to access, to my father’s great delight.

The index was constantly being updated. When my father had last done a search for McClellands, he hadn’t been able to find any entries that matched our McClellands, the ones in the old family Bible. But this time…

‘I found him,’ my father announced, with that satisfied tone of discovery that he knew I’d understand fully, and share. ‘They’ve done a few more churches since the last update, and when I went online tonight, there it was—David John McClelland’s marriage to Sophia Paterson, on the 13th of June, in Kirkcudbright, in 1710. That’s our man. So I’ll order the actual film, to look at. I likely won’t find out much more. If Scottish records are anything like the ones in Northern Ireland, they won’t mention the parents of either the bride or the groom, but you never do know. We can hope.’

‘That’s great, Daddy.’ Though somehow, with what I’d just written, I didn’t like being reminded that Sophia Paterson had, in real life, married into what probably had been a dull, Presbyterian family.

‘There’s more, though,’ my father assured me. ‘And that’s why I’m calling.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘Yes. Remember you said that you’d give your Sophia, the one in your new book, a birthdate of…what was it, 1689?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, on the IGI, I also found the baptism of a Sophia Paterson in Kirkcudbright in December, 1689. How’s that for coincidence? There’s no way, at the moment, we can tell if this is our Sophia. We don’t have anything to cross-reference it with. If we knew the name of our Sophia’s father, we could at least see if it matched the name of the father on the baptism…’

‘James Paterson,’ I murmured automatically.

‘It is James, actually,’ my father said, but he was too amused to think that I’d been serious. It was a running joke between us that whenever we discovered a male ancestor, his name was either John or James, or, very rarely, David—common names that made it difficult to trace them in the records. There might be countless James McClellands listed living in a town, and we would have to check details of every one of them before we found the one that we were after. ‘What we need,’ my father always used to say, ‘is an Octavius, or maybe a Horatio.’

He told me, now, ‘I had a quick look on that Scottish will site, but of course there are so many James Patersons listed there’s no way to narrow them down. I don’t know when he died. And even if I did know, and I managed to download the right will, he would still have to have actually left something to David John McClelland, or to have mentioned a daughter Sophia McClelland, for us to be able to make a connection between them.’

‘You wouldn’t remember if one of those wills had been proved around 1699?’ I asked, almost not wanting to know what the answer might be.

He paused. ‘Why 1699?’

I thought about my character Sophia telling Kirsty of the kind of man her father was, and how he’d died on board the ship to Darien. And the first Scots expeditions into Darien, if I remembered rightly, had begun in 1699.

Aloud I said, ‘It doesn’t matter. Just forget I asked,’ and steered our talk to other things.

He wasn’t on the phone for too much longer, and when we’d said goodbye I went to make a cup of coffee, thinking maybe, with the help of some caffeine, I could pick up again where I’d been interrupted in my writing.

But it didn’t work.

I was just sitting there and staring at the cursor blinking on the screen, when my father called back later on.

‘What do you know,’ he asked, ‘that I don’t know?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Well, I went back on the Scottish will site, and I found a will there for James Paterson, in 1699, in which he leaves a third of his estate to his wife, Mary, and another third to be divided between his two daughters, Anna and Sophia.’ His small silence was accusing. ‘That doesn’t mean, of course, that he’s in any way connected to us, or that his Sophia is the one who later married David John McClelland, but still… how did you hit on that year, in particular?’

I cleared my throat. ‘Who did he leave the final third to?’

‘What?’

‘The final third of his estate. Who did he leave it to?’

‘A friend of his. I don’t recall…oh, here it is. John Drummond.’

It was my turn to be silent.

‘Carrie?’ asked my father. ‘Are you still there?’

‘I’m still here.’ But that was not exactly true, because a part of me, I knew, was slipping backward through the darkness, to a young girl named Sophia, living in the stern, unloving household of her Uncle John—John Drummond—while she dreamed of fields of grass that once had bowed before her when she walked, and of the morning air that carried happiness upon it, and the mother who lived only in her memory.

CHAPTER 9

THE CASTLE WOOD WAS silent at this hour of the morning. No rooks were wheeling round the treetops, though I saw a few hunched high up in the bare and twisted branches, looking down on me in silence as I passed.