My Dearest Robert,
Today I told Sydney the Legend of Muir Harbor . . . and then later realized that in all the time we spent together in those three weeks before you shipped out, I’d never told you the legend. Well, better late than never, as they say.
It starts, as so many Gaelic stories do, with two clans and an ageless feud . . . and eventually, a family set adrift at sea. I told you once, surely I did, that Muir is the Gaelic word for sea. As the legend goes, the famed and ferocious Alec Muir said it was only fitting that the sea gift his family their freedom and future.
But he didn’t leave Scotland empty-handed. Under the veil of night, he took from his enemy a pewter chalice said to have once touched the lips of the Bonnie Prince Charlie himself when he was hiding amongst the Highlander clan after the Rebellion.
’Twas simply an act of malice, no doubt. But what Alec Muir discovered weeks later, already tucked in the sea’s embrace, was that he’d not only stolen his enemy’s most prized possession, but also a bag, hidden inside the chalice, containing enough gold to not only settle in a new land, but to make his mark for lifetimes to come.
He bought a farm on a rocky piece of land that reminded him of his Highland home and built a town to bear his name and still there was gold to spare.
For years to come, however, he’d watch the harbor with a keen eye—wondering, ever-wary, if his enemy might one day cross the ocean. Come for his chalice and his coin. Come for his revenge. There he’d stand when the ships came in, his cape flapping in the wind, one hand on his scabbard and the other holding his spyglass.
Decades later, old and prosperous but of increasingly poor health, he began to think less and less of his enemy and more and more of his own thievery. Hour by hour he wondered if His Maker would speak of it whence they met. And so, though weak and tired, he climbed from his bed one night to retrieve the chalice from its hiding place. Aye, he would wrap it up and send it across the sea, add his own coin to the remaining gold, and thus soothe his stinging conscience.
But when he got to the hiding place, the chalice was nowhere to be found. His wife, his children, his grandchildren—every one he set to searching. But the chalice was never found and he died the next day.
’Tis said that somewhere on Muir Farm, a chalice filled with gold still rests in its hiding place. And that some nights at the harbor, you can still hear the flapping of Alec Muir’s cape in the wind.
What do you think of that, Robert?
I think before today it’d been too long since I told that story. Diana used to love it so. Used to beg me to tell her over and over when she was a child. And oh, the hours she spent searching this house and the barn and the rocky shore . . .
Do you know what Sydney said when I told her? She said, “And just when I thought I couldn’t love this place more, I find out there’s a ghost story connected to it.”
Funny, I never thought of it as a ghost story. But then, the real ghosts aren’t men in capes in stories. They’re the people we never stop missing.
With all my love,
Maggie
P.S. It’s never occurred to me until now that Diana asked me to tell her that story again the weekend she came home with little Cynthia in tow. Of all the things to talk about after a two-year absence!