The deal was done. Now there was little to do but write his last letters home, and wait with nervous anticipation as the Minerva finished her toilette. He bought copies of the New Testament in town, and sent them on a boat bound for the Western Isles to the young women of Barra: his sisters, Miss Finlayson Kilbride, and his dear Miss Margaret – his first love, who he was leaving behind. Oh, the agony of waiting! With every passing day he was forced to renew his resolve.
God’s will be done. And God’s will, he reminded himself, was that he must go. On Monday, seeking solace in prayer, he went to the kirk twice, both in the morning and in the afternoon. But it left him cold. The clergymen I heard were strangers.
Hold steady. Tuesday dawned and they filed aboard, heavy trunks stowed neatly under narrow bunks. Anchor up, sails unfurled. Course set for the south. After all the anticipation, all the hanging around, there was a carnival atmosphere. At night the steerage passengers ventured up onto the decks and danced under the stars in delight. But McMillan was in no mood for celebrations. They should employ their time to better advantage, he thought darkly, and retreated to his cabin to scribble in his journal and dwell on the dark coast that drifted ceaselessly by, inch by inch, behind him into the night.
He would never go home again.
At twenty-seven, he was already a man with some experience of the sea. An islander by birth, he had grown up in and around boats; he knew well the whip of the wind and salt spray on the face, the constant shifting of the deck beneath him.
He and his family had spent their lives skipping between the Hebridean islands, as his father Ewen sought out suitable positions to support his growing brood. Angus was the fourth of at least fourteen children, a large family even in those times; and though the McMillans were not poor, relatively speaking – Ewen was a tacksman, a sort of intermediary between clan chief and the peasantry, the closest equivalent to a middle class in traditional Highland society – their position was unstable.
The agricultural revolution sweeping Scotland was rendering the role of the tacksman obsolete as more and more English managers and ‘land economists’ were brought in to commercialise the vast Highland estates. Change was afoot; the McMillans kept on the move. They had started in Glen Brittle on the Isle of Skye, at the foot of the forbidding Cuillin ridge. It was the domain of Macleod of Macleod, the clan chief who – when not in London – lived at Dunvegan Castle, twenty miles to the north-west.
As tacksman Ewen had made a name for himself as a grafter and an innovator, importing new, improved breeds of sheep from the mainland, before he met and married Marion, a well-connected local girl both well educated and deeply devout. Their growing brood had been instilled with the importance of religion and education, of leading a moral life, and the skills for self-sufficiency necessary in a remote community.
But across the Macleod estate, rents were rising like the tide, and there was no extra money coming in to pay them with. When their nineteen-year lease came to an end, the family packed up and sailed west, first to South Uist, and then to Barra, a jewel of an island just to the south, where Angus spent his formative years. The then laird, General Roderick MacNeil, had converted from Catholicism, and brought numbers of Protestant outsiders onto the island after inheriting the estate in 1822; the industrious – and numerous – McMillans took to their subsidiary role as lay missionaries as energetically as MacNeil could have hoped.
It had been an outdoor, practical, windswept childhood; one spent trudging through rain and snow and hail, mending fences and lambing sheep, navigating small boats through the wild gales that howled their way down the Minch. So, on board the Minerva, he stared up at the sails and out to the horizon with a critical eye, and noted the ship’s pace and progress in his journal each day. Within a few hours, his spirits began to sink: our craft does not appear to be a good sailor. But conditions were good, at least. The coast of Ireland appeared within the day, and then Wales. Fine leading under single reef top sails. The wind was behind them, blowing them straight down the Irish Sea, and out into the Atlantic Ocean.
I too was now twenty-seven. It had taken eighteen months to get things in order – or, more accurately, sufficiently disordered – so that I might head off in pursuit of Angus McMillan. I’d left my job, left London, amassed some (already dwindling) funds, and booked my own passage to Australia.
Before I left, I returned to Skye for a last look. I need to get closer to him; to nestle in close to the heart of this strange man and listen for his pulse. I was thinking of the tombstone with his name in absentia, of the black gabbro cliffs of the ragged-edged range that loomed over McMillan in his infancy. I wanted to see it all afresh, start at his beginning and work from there.
I had dragged my boyfriend with me. Well, ‘dragged’ is unfair. Alex loved the Highlands as much as I did – more, even. He was a Londoner who dreamed of moors and mountains, who saw the whole of Scotland as a sort of adventure playground of snow and rock, of peaks to be scaled and troughs to be traversed. He’d been dragging me to remote parts, to the tops of mountains and to icy trig points – fingers of cement rising out of the rock, shrouded in mist, encrusted in windsculpted ice – for months.
It was winter now; we’d been living together since the spring. Our reckless love, a whirlwind of promises and declarations, had culminated in a hasty move to the countryside. Each of us had seen in the other an easy solution to problems we had not yet been ready to voice. But now, in our house in a village in the north of England, each of us had been sitting in separate rooms, making separate plans for the coming months. We had made a deal: meet you back here in spring. ‘We’ll be fine,’ we each said to each other. ‘It’s not so long.’ And we smiled with our mouths but not with our eyes. This trip would be our swansong, but we were not yet ready to voice that thought either.
Since my visit with my mother, my brother Rory had moved to Skye with his wife to start a family. Mum and her siblings had been almost euphoric at the announcement; the family claim to the island had been shored up, brought from the academic into the actual and made solid again. Myles was in the process of handing over the family croft so my brother might build a house on it.
Alex and I drove north, the car packed with everything we owned, love blooming in my heart as the neat dry-stone-wall stitching of Cumbria gave way first to the long slow slopes of the Southern Uplands, and then to the bleaknesses and steepnesses of the Highlands. Winter was closing in, and with it came the all-encompassing dark. At Cluanie we slowed to a crawl, wary of the red deer that had come down off the hills to amass along the roadside, lantern eyes glinting in the darkness like some terrible premonition. I nosed the car into their midst, taking care not to touch one with the bumper and jolt this dream sequence into the real, and slid to a halt as the largest stag stood his ground in the centre of the road. He raised his head, many-pointed antlers silhouetted against the gloom like a great pair of wings opening. Then slowly, insolently, he turned and bounded down the bank, white rabbit-tail flashing in the shaft of headlight.
Poring over the map that night, my eyes alighted on a small grey square near a bay pockmarked with the stippled texture signifying pebble beach. ‘Glenbrittle House’, said the label. McMillan’s childhood home. I waved Alex over, but his eyes snagged instead on the mass of contours to the near east: the Cuillin ridge, all tumbling crags and chutes of scree. He cared little for my murdering relative; he ached instead for the feel of cold rock under his hands. We made another deal.
In the morning we set off again for the hills, heating on full blast and rain blattering at the windscreen. Talking in undertones, still half asleep, we nearly didn’t see the bird hunched in the middle of the road, watching our approach with wide yellow eyes as he guarded some small prey in his talons. Alex slammed on the brakes as the bird took off, but too late and in the wrong direction. He launched and flew directly into our path, glaring in