Chapter 38
The frost lies thick upon Glenoran’s stones tonight. The world is quiet, save for the crack of ice on the eaves and the soft breathing of my bairns above. Winter used to frighten me… its silence, its stillness… but now it feels like a shroud drawn gently over the past.
Harris has been gone these two years.
The paper they sent from Inverness sits folded in this book:
Executed for High Treason.
Cold words for a warm man.
I have not visited the kirkyard where they claim he lies.
The earth there does not ken his name.
Glenoran does.
There are days I swear I hear his boots on the stair. Days when the door groans in the wind and my heart leaps like a fool, hoping… already halfway risen from my chair.
But only the draft enters, carrying the ache of a world that hung him.
Dubh stands closer to the house these days. He never did that for anyone but Harris… until me.
I have done the work he left to me.
Not alone… never alone.
Flora stood beside me, as she always did: steadfast, clever, sharp as sea-wind. She helped me move what remained of him… his last hope for Scotland, his last pieces of legacy… into the heart of our life together.
Hide it where the warmth never dies, she told me.
Where hearts gather.
Where no Englishman will ever think to dig.
I understood her at once.
It is finished now.
Sealed. Guarded. Swallowed by stone and fire-gloam.
Let the world chase lochs and legends. Let them drown in Arkaig’s depths and dig up Culloden’s heather. They will never find what sleeps here.
In these long months since, grief has carved its mark upon me.
And I… have carved mine upon Glenoran.
The maids whisper that the Lady has gone mad, cutting symbols into stone—but it is not madness. It is memory. The walls bear our thistle now—over hearthstones, lintels, doorframes, cellar beams. My hand remembers the shape even when my heart forgets to beat.
Each one is a vow:
That our promise endures.
That Harris’s name will not die of silence.
That someday, someone of our blood will ken the truth.
Elizabeth grows like a thistle through frost… Our sweet Bess, is nearing three now. She has her father’s dark eyes, stubborn jaw, and the quiet watchfulness that used to undo me. But her curls burn red as a sunrise after storm. My fire, his steadiness. I pray she keeps both.
She will never remember the sound of her father’s voice, but I will tell her.
And she will know.
If anyone should find this journal, hidden where truth waits for the worthy, know this:
We kept faith when all else failed.
We buried not only coin, but promise.
We left our legacy not for kings, nor thieves, but for the blood that bears our names.
When time has swallowed our footprints,
when the house sleeps and the hearth goes cold,
when all that’s left are the thistles I carved in sorrow…follow them.
If the thistle endures,
follow it home.
— Fiona Cameron Mackenzie