“This is the place.”
Doctor Hamish prodded the earth with his stick. Jamie and I stood beside him, breathless from our climb through Blairguthrie’s woods. Though autumn would soon be upon us, the weather was warm and humid. But I could not take off my hat or coat. It would not be respectful to the memory of the person we had come to honour.
Jamie stepped forward and laid a small brass plaque upon the ground. We all looked at it, set there on a mossy, leaf-strewn patch of earth that was too shaded from the sunlight for any grass to grow. It had not been possible to engrave it with the usual sort of epitaph for a child, because this burial had been illegal and must remain secret. Instead, it bore one word only: Cat.
It had been Jamie’s idea. If anyone should chance upon the plaque, he had declared, they would assume it marked the burial place of a beloved pet. Mrs McAllister had approved; it had been a cat, of sorts, that had brought her second grandson back to her.
“The soil is loose here,” observed Doctor Hamish. His voice was serious, but not distressed. “We knew these woods so well, Anne and I, it was easy for us to find a convenient spot.”
I thought how different the place must have been on that long-ago January day. The treetops had perhaps been agitated by the wind, or sleet had fallen in freezing spikes that stung the faces of the man and the woman as they lowered their baby into his grave. And the enormity of the secret they had kept for all these years struck me once again: if Lucy had not been so strictly bound by an unforgiving society’s rules, she would never have given up her child. Jamie would have grown up at the Lodge with his mother and grandmother, and gone to school like other boys. Anne might never have become ill, and another boy might have been born to her. This little boy and his cousin, like Hamish Buchanan and David Graham before them, would have grown to love Drumwithie, spending happy days in this wild and beautiful landscape.
But society’s rules could not be broken. I wondered ruefully if the twenty-one years that had passed had changed those rules at all. New Georgians we might be, and women might achieve the vote and enter professions, as Doctor Hamish predicted. But if I were to have a baby without a husband, would my own mother welcome me and my child to Chester House and brave the social stigma of such a scandalous event? I doubted it.
I shuddered, violently enough for Jamie to step closer and draw my arm around his waist. Doctor Hamish’s eyes were closed; I wondered if he was praying. His brow was not furrowed or his mouth drawn. He looked at peace.
All around us was silence. I gazed down at my name, alert for a sound which never came. No birds sang; no leaves rustled. And high above, where the trees met the sky, no crows’ wings beat their death knell. They no longer held the power to herald disaster. The master of Drumwithie, his heir, his family and those who served them, were free.
THE END