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comfort me, begging me to eat, himself weeping, holding me in his arms all night long, rocking me in the hope I would sleep. The kindness made me worse, for I felt it to be my fault that so many had died. All I could say, between sobs, was that they would still be alive if they had not come to make me happy on my birthday. Then Mama came to sit with me for a little time, begging my father to go and rest, but as soon as Papa was gone, she slapped me as hard as she could—not very hard, for she was weak herself—and called me a selfish, thoughtless slut.
    â€œYou spoiled, self-indulgent monster,” she hissed. “Do you think your father does not grieve, nor I? What right have you to add to our pain with your lamentations? If as you say it is your fault your brothers are dead, is it not your duty to comfort us ? Your father has not slept in two nights because of your selfishness. Will you be more content when you have killed him too?”
    The slap and the cruelty of her words stunned me. I was silent for a minute or two, then cried that she was cruel and heartless and I hated her, and wept more than ever—I wonder if I wished she would beat me in the hope that the punishment would lift away some part of my burden of guilt. But she did not respond either to my tears or my words, only sat staring into nothing with a face like a stone mask of misery until my father’s step could be heard returning. Then her face changed and she went to him and scolded with loving gentleness because he had come so soon. He said she should be in her bed herself and that he could not rest while I, his pearl of price, he called me, was in danger.
    My cot had been moved into Mama’s bedchamber so that she could hear how I was cared for even while she lay abed. The window was wide open in the mild spring day, and the light from it fell full on Papa’s face as he stood in the doorway. When I saw how sunken were his eyes, their bright blue dimmed to watery grey, and how the skin hung on the broad bones of his face, my mother’s cruel words rang in my head…and did not seem cruel but just. I was a monster not to have seen how much I added to his suffering while I indulged my own grief. From that moment I struggled to bury it, and I think I succeeded in becoming a comfort to Mama and Papa. But I never celebrated my birthday again…never.
    So my thirteenth year began and so it ended. Duncan and Malcolm, with their wives and children, and Angus and Fergus died in the first week of May. Andrew, who had survived the disease, as had I, was granted the high honor of accompanying his bishop on a trip to Rome; he died there late in January. We did not learn of his death until the end of April, and by then I had no more tears to shed, for my mother had died only two weeks earlier. It was the one mercy of that terrible year that my mother did not need to hear of Andrew’s death.
    After that, the hand of God was lifted from us—but not all the way and only for a time. Donald left his service with King David of Scotland and came home, for he was now the heir to Ulle. He had sworn he would never take a wife, but now he agreed to marry to breed sons. Papa chose the girl, far more with an eye to the sum she would bring as dower than to her beauty or temper—Papa was sure that Donald was too hardened a sinner to be reformed by any woman—and so Mildred’s dower brought Thirl manor and its lands into my family. And then a strange thing happened: Although I cannot say Mildred was a beauty, she had such charm that Donald was soon weaned away from his pursuit of other women. Somehow she satisfied him completely.
    I cannot help but laugh at myself and my stupidity when I think about Mildred. I was then so sure of my power over men, not thinking that when I was neither sister nor daughter my advantage might disappear, that I never asked Mildred how she had conquered Donald. We were good friends too, for Mildred was