The letter fit easily into the heart of the old desk. A moment of panic: should she have included locks of the kids’ hair? No, she thought fiercely. Don’t be morbid. Sentimental, yes. Morbid, no.
“Lord, let us all be together again,” she whispered, pushing down the fear, and, closing her eyes, shut the panel with a little click.
If she hadn’t opened her eyes right as she withdrew her hand, she’d never have seen it. Just the edge of something hanging down at the back of the big drawer, barely visible. She reached up and found an envelope, far back, attached to the underside of the desk with Scotch tape. This had dried with age; her earlier slamming of the drawer had probably loosened it.
She turned the envelope over with a sense of something happening in a dream and was, dreamlike, not surprised to see the initials B.E.R. written on the yellowed envelope. Very slowly, she opened it.
Dearest Deadeye, she read, and felt each tiny hair on her body rise slow and silent, one at a time.
Dearest Deadeye,
You’ve just left me, after our wonderful afternoon among the clay pigeons. My ears are still ringing. Whenever we shoot, I’m torn between immense pride in your ability, envy of it—and fear that you may someday need it.
What a queer feeling it is, writing this. I know that you’ll eventually learn who—and perhaps, what—you are. But I have no idea how you’ll come to that knowledge. Am I about to reveal you to yourself, or will this be old news when you find it? If we’re both lucky, I may be able to tell you in person, when you’re a little older. And if we’re very lucky, it will come to nothing. But I daren’t risk your life in that hope, and you’re not yet old enough that I could tell you.
I’m sorry, sweetheart, that’s terribly melodramatic. And the last thing I want to do is alarm you. I have all the confidence in the world in you. But I am your father and thus prey to the fears that afflict all parents—that something dreadful and unpreventable will happen to one’s child, and you powerless to protect her.
“What the hell, Daddy?” She rubbed hard at the back of her neck to ease the prickling there.
Men who’ve lived through war usually don’t talk about it, save to other soldiers. Men from my part of the Service don’t talk to anyone, and not only because of the Official Secrets Act. But silence eats at the soul. I had to talk to someone, and my old friend Reggie Wakefield became my confessor.
(That’s the Reverend Reginald Wakefield, a Church of Scotland minister who lives in Inverness. If you’re reading this letter, I’ll very likely be dead. If Reggie is still alive and you are of age, go to see him; he has my permission to tell you anything he knows at that point.)
“Of age?” Hastily, she tried to calculate when this had been written. Clay pigeons. Sherman’s—the shooting range where he’d taught her to use a shotgun. The shotgun had been a present for her fifteenth birthday. And her father had died soon after her seventeenth birthday.
The Service has nothing directly to do with this; don’t go looking in that direction for information. I mention it only because that’s where I learned what a conspiracy looks like. I also met a great many people in the war, many of them in high places, and many of them strange; the two overlap more often than one might wish.
Why is this so hard to say? If I’m dead, your mother may have told you already the story of your birth. She promised me that she would never speak of it, so long as I lived, and I’m sure she hasn’t. If I’m dead, though, she might—
Forgive me, darling. It’s hard to say, because I love your mother and I love you. And you are my daughter forever, but you were sired by another man.
All right, that’s out. Seeing it in black and white, my impulse is to rip this paper to bits and burn them, but I won’t. You have to know.
Shortly after the war ended, your mother and I came to Scotland. Something of a second honeymoon. She went out one afternoon to pick flowers—and never came back. I searched—everyone searched—for months, but there was no sign, and eventually the police stopped—well, in fact they didn’t stop suspecting me of murdering her, damn them, but they grew tired of harassing me. I had begun to put my life back together, made up my mind to move on, perhaps leave Britain—and then Claire came back. Three years after her disappearance, she showed up in the Highlands, filthy, starved, battered—and pregnant.
Pregnant, she said, by a Jacobite Highlander from 1743 named James Fraser. I won’t go into all that was said between us; it was a long time ago and it doesn’t matter—save for the fact that IF your mother was telling the truth, and did indeed travel back in time, then you may have the ability to do it, too. I hope you don’t. But if you should—Lord, I can’t believe I’m writing this in all seriousness. But I look at you, darling, with the sun on your ruddy hair, and I see him. I can’t deny that.
Well. It took a long time. A very long time. But your mother never changed her story, and though we didn’t speak about it after a while, it became obvious that she wasn’t mentally deranged (which I had rather naturally assumed to be the case, initially). And I began . . . to look for him.
Now I must digress for a moment; forgive me. I think you won’t have heard of the Brahan Seer. Colorful as he was—if, in fact, he existed—he’s not really known much beyond those circles with a taste for the more outlandish aspects of Scottish history. Reggie, though, is a man of immense curiosity, as well as immense learning, and was fascinated by the Seer—one Kenneth MacKenzie, who lived in the seventeenth century (maybe), and who made a great number of prophecies about this and that, sometimes at the behest of the Earl of Seaforth.