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could hardly confess thatmost nights Jack slept by my side.
    ‘Rose is a right bonny name,’ said Mr Macmerry desperately.
    His wife regarded me solemnly. ‘Rose? Not very Scotch though, is it,’ she reminded him.
    He shook his head, his gentle laugh indicated that I was not to be offended. ‘I don’t suppose you know, Rose, but your father was once on a case in this area. I canna mind exactly, it was a fair time ago.’
    Pausing, he smiled. ‘But we never imagined then that our wee lad would one day be marrying the daughter of the famous Inspector Faro –’
    ‘Oh, did you meet him?’ I interrupted eagerly, ignoring Mrs Macmerry’s stony glance and grasping this new talking point for what it might open up.
    ‘Nay, lass, it was market day in Peebles that Friday.’ He sounded disappointed and as I was left wondering what the case had been, Mrs Macmerry put in sharply, ‘Of course, it was nothing involving any of our friends or the farming folk, thank goodness.’
    Mr Macmerry frowned. ‘Something to do with Fenians. I think that’s what it was.’ His vague tone suggested that national politics were beyond the range or interest of local farmers.
    As a silence ensued above the horse’s clip-clopping along the leafy road I suppressed a sigh. What I would have given for Jack’s presence at that moment.
    Surprisingly, his father must have sensed my anxiety. ‘The lad shouldna be long now,’ he said heartily, as if Jack had just gone down the road for a message from the shops.
    I smiled weakly, hoping that he was right. How little he knew the machinations of the criminal courts, where days were known to stretch into weeks and even months during trials. Again I suppressed that burst of resentment against the absent Jack for I didn’t relish the immediate future of unspecified days at Eildon Farm under his mother’s relentless gaze.
    ‘Jack said you were a teacher,’ said his father.
    ‘Yes, that was before I went to Arizona.’
    ‘Arizona?’ queried his mother.
    ‘That’s America, Jess, over in the west,’ she was told.
    ‘Ariz – ona,’ she repeated, making it sound what it was to folk who had never travelled further than the nearest town: the very ends of the earth, beyond imagination. ‘How long were you there?’
    ‘Ten years.’
    ‘You must have been just a bairn at the time,’ said Mr Macmerry kindly.
    ‘Not quite, I had been teaching for a few years.’
    And I was conscious of Mrs Macmerry at my side. She was moving her lips in some sharp mental arithmetic, shocked to realise what Jack maybe had not told them; that I must be at least thirty, perhaps even older than himself. Another altogether appalling revelation.
    A rather more uncomfortable silence followed, in which I received some searching glances. I was no doubt expected to carry on the conversation with accounts of my life in Arizona, what had taken me to this remote wilderness.
    I was saved. Crossroads and a signpost loomed into view. A sharp turn to the right and the leafy lane revealed distant houses, a village nestling in the folds of the Eildon Hills.
    Soon be home now, I was told.
    I felt a warming of the heart, my natural affinity to living in the shadow of ancient hills. There had been hills too, gigantic ranges of prehistoric red rocks, in Arizona, fringed by red desert. Perhaps that was what had endeared it to me, a place of destiny that I would never again see in this world.
    A life and a child lost forever.
    A husband too. For at that moment I did not doubt that the old nun had been mistaken and I would never see Danny again.

Chapter Five
    A skeletal ruined abbey drifted into view, carefully railed off, its remains much abused by time and the removal of its stones from which most of Eildon had arisen.
    Mrs Macmerry drew my attention to a rather ugly modern church which had not been so fortunate in its architects.
    ‘That’s where we were married. Our Jack was baptised there. As you’re not attached to any particular