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experience of helping him track down our family’s records. Once you got back past the mid-1800s, women seldom rated more than an occasional notation. Even churches often didn’t bother listing what the mother’s name was, in their registers of births. And newspapers would only state ‘The wife of Mr So-and-So’ had died. Unless there was money in the family, which there rarely was in ours, a woman’s life left scarcely any mark upon the pages of the history books. We were fortunate we had the family Bible.
    ‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m just making up her life for my book anyway, so I can make her any age I like. Let’s just imagine she was twenty-one when she got married, that would make her birthdate…1689.’ I did the math. It also made her eighteen in the year my story started, which seemed just about the right age for my heroine.
    A muffled voice said something in the background, and my father said, ‘Your mother wants a word. Did you need anything else on the McClellands, while I’ve got the files out?’
    ‘No, thanks. I just wanted Sophia’s last name.’
    ‘Make her nice,’ was his only advice, lightly given. ‘We don’t want any villains in the family.’
    ‘She’s the heroine.’
    ‘That’s fine, then. Here’s your mother.’
    My mother was, predictably, less concerned with family history and the book that I was working on than why I’d moved so suddenly from France, and why on earth I’d picked a cottage on the Scottish coast in winter , and whether there were cliffs. ‘On second thought,’ she said, ‘don’t tell me.’
    ‘There are no cliffs where my cottage is,’ I promised her, but she was far too sharp to fool.
    She said, ‘Just don’t go near the edge.’
    That made me smile when I remembered it a little while later, when I made myself another cup of coffee. You couldn’t get much closer to the cliff’s edge than the ruins of Slains castle, and my mother would have had a minor heart attack if she had seen me climbing round them Monday. Better that she didn’t see the things I did, sometimes, for research.
    The fire had died down a bit in the stove, and I threw on a shovel of coals from the big metal coal hod that Jimmy had left for me, not really knowing how many to put on to last through the night. I poked at them inexpertly, and watched the new coals catch and hiss to life with clear blue flames that seemed to dance above their darkness. And while I watched the fire I felt the writer’s trance take hold of me. I seemed to see, again, the dying fire within that castle chamber, and to hear the man’s voice saying, at my back, ‘We will have warmth enough.’
    I needed nothing more. I firmly closed the Aga’s door, and taking up my coffee went to set up my computer. If my characters were in a mood to speak to me, the least that I could do was find out what they had to say.

I
     
    She fought the need to sleep. It caught her up in rolling waves, in rhythm with the motion of her horse, and lulled her weary body till she felt herself relaxing, giving in. The blackness flooded round her and she drifted in it, slipping in the saddle, and the loss of balance jerked her into wakefulness. She clutched the reins. The horse, who must have surely been as tired as she was, answered with an irritated movement of its head, and turned a dark reproachful eye towards her before swinging its nose round again to the north.
    The eyes of the priest who was riding beside her were more understanding. ‘Do you grow too tired? We have not far to go, and I would wish to see our journey end tonight, but if you feel that you can ride no further…’
    ‘I can ride, Mr Hall.’ And she straightened, to prove it. She had no desire to stop so near the goal. It had been two weeks since she had set out from the Western Shires, and every bone within her ached from travelling. There had, of course, been Edinburgh – one night upon a proper bed, and water hot for bathing – but that memory