Page 45 of Bonetide

“It means call me first.”

Good lord, what is with these Highland men and their inability to speak plainly?

He stands up, the chair making a loud sound on the kitchen floor. He hasn’t touched his tea past the first sip.

“I’m sorry to bring this to your door, Iris. I’ll see myself out.”

He doesn’t wait for me to walk him. He goes back through the sitting room, into the front hall, and out the front door, then I hear the car start a moment later, and the wheels on the gravel, and the engine receding down the drive, and then nothing.

I get up and lock the door.

Then I go to the trunk.

I placed the trunk in the mudroom and, despite having told myself I need to go through all the letters and materials in the chest, I haven’t done so in a while. I guess there’s been a part of me that wants to remain in the dark.

But not anymore.

The latches are stiff as I work them open. The lid lifts with the soft dry creaking of old hinges, and the scents of camphor and lavender, and, beneath that, the smell of paper.

I take everything out and lay it on the floor around me.

The field sketches I have already looked at. The packets of pressed flowers, the tin of pen nibs, the notebooks I haven’t yet opened.

The horse on the cartridge paper, the one that looks exactly like the one I saw in the woods, came at low tide; did not invite.

The list of names, forty-seven of them.

At the bottom, against the cedar wood of the trunk’s base, are two things.

A bundle of letters tied with twine, the paper cream and slightly yellowed at the edges, and, beside the bundle, in the corner of the trunk like it was placed there with intention, a small wooden box.

It’s a bit larger than my palm. Dark wood, almost black, polished smooth. There’s no clasp on it, no hinge that I can see, only a thin seam around the middle that suggests it does come apart somewhere if I knew how. The wood has carvings on the lid I can’t quite read in the low light. Knotwork, maybe? Or letters that aren’t letters in any alphabet I know.

I pick it up.

It’s heavier than it looks.

I shake it gently. Something inside makes a dull, soft sound against the wood.

I sigh and flip it over again, unsure how to open it.

I set the box on the floor beside the bundle of letters and sit cross-legged on the cold floorboards with both of them in front of me, my hips screaming at the stretch, and look at them for a long time without touching either.

The bundle is the easier of the two.

I untie the twine and release the letters, maybe twenty in total. The top one is dated 3rd of March, 2024—a year before Effie’s death. The bottom one, when I work my way down, is dated 9th of November, 1949.

Seventy-five years.

I read the top one first.

It’s brief. The same handwriting on every letter, Effie’s hand, neat and slanting, the kind a person used to writing in field notebooks has after decades of doing it.

Eachann, it reads.

The bargain holds. I have not asked anything of you that you did not say you would give. I have kept what I said I would keep. I do not know if I am writing because I want you to know it, or because I want me to know it. Either way. The arrangement has been a kindness to both of us, though I would not have chosen the word at the time.

I will not send this. I never send them. But I write them. That is the part I cannot stop doing. Maybe in hopes that one day you’ll ask to see them.