The Son Without a Name

Chapter 1 – The Son Without a Name

Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France · Early eighteenth century

I was born in France with my mother’s name and my father’s blood. The name was Morel. The blood was MacKail. Of the two, the blood proved the more dangerous inheritance.

I cannot tell you that I remember the first meeting between Robbie MacKail and Madeleine Morel. No child remembers the hour before he begins. I know it only from what my mother told me, from the silences she left around certain words, and from the few things my father said years later when he had drunk enough wine to mistake memory for strategy.

My mother said she first saw him on a wet evening in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, when the streets shone black under the rain and every foreigner in the town seemed to carry either a grievance or a secret. There were many Scots and Irishmen there in those days, speaking of kings as though a crown lost across the water might still be recovered by faith or steel. Some were soldiers without regiments or gentlemen without estates. Others were priests, couriers and servants of great houses, while a few were merely fools who thought themselves patriots because they had learnt the shape of an old sorrow.

My father was not yet thirty, which surprised me when I first understood it. As a boy, I imagined him older at the beginning of every story, as though wickedness required time to ripen. It does not; ambition and contempt can both flourish in the young.

He came to my mother’s house under another name.

That was the first thing she told me, and the last thing she would admit easily.

The house belonged to my grandmother, Madame Élodie Morel, a widow who let rooms to clerks, foreign officers and men passing between Paris and the coast. My grandfather, Étienne Morel, had worked as a bookkeeper in a merchant’s office near the river before a fever took him. He left debts, ledgers and a daughter whose mind was too exact for most men’s comfort. My mother could read a bill of lading, improve the French of a merchant’s letter and tell from a man’s boots whether he had come from the docks or the gaming table. Such talents did not make a woman rich, but they made her useful. Useful women are easily mistaken for harmless ones.

The man who called himself Monsieur Robert MacAllan arrived with a soaked cloak, a leather satchel, and eyes that did not rest where they were expected to rest. My mother was in the narrow front room, mending the linen accounts by candlelight while her mother argued in the kitchen with a porter over a broken trunk. He stood just inside the door, removing his gloves finger by finger, not hurried, not apologetic, as though the room had been waiting for him.

He asked for a private chamber.

My mother asked how long he would require it.

‘One night,’ he said.

‘Men who ask for one night often stay three,’ she answered.

He looked at her then properly. She said his eyes were green, though not gentle. Green like bottle glass, she once said, and just as capable of cutting.

‘Then charge me for three.’

‘That depends whether you pay as Monsieur MacAllan, or as the gentleman whose letter arrived yesterday.’

He went still.

It was not a large stillness. Robbie MacKail was never a man to show alarm plainly. But my mother saw the glove stop between his hands, saw the slight tightening at the mouth.

‘What letter?’ he asked.

She rose, crossed to the little escritoire near the wall, and withdrew a folded paper sealed in dark wax.

‘A letter addressed to Monsieur Robert MacKail,’ she said. ‘Delivered by a Breton courier who smelled of horse sweat and lies. My mother put it aside, since no such gentleman had taken a room here. Then you arrived.’

For a moment, the rain spoke louder than either of them. It struck the shutters in sharp little blows.

‘You opened it?’ he asked.

‘I do not open letters that are not mine.’

‘But you read names that are not given to you.’

‘I read what is written on the outside. It is a habit of clerks’ daughters.’

He took the letter from her. His fingers brushed hers. She did not withdraw quickly, and that, she later said, was her first mistake.

‘You’re bold,’ he said.

‘No, monsieur. Only observant.’

‘Observation can be dangerous.’

‘So can paying for one night when three are needed.’

That amused him. He laughed softly, not with warmth, but with appreciation. It was the laugh of a man who had found a knife where he expected a spoon.

‘What is your name?’

‘Madeleine Morel.’

‘And do you make a habit of guarding men’s secrets, Madeleine Morel?’

‘Only when they pay their account.’

He smiled at that. Then he bowed slightly.

‘Robert MacKail,’ he said. ‘Though I would prefer that name not to travel beyond this room.’

My mother should have given the letter back and called for her mother. She should have treated him as one more foreigner with too many names, too many debts, and too much confidence. But she was young enough to be curious and old enough to believe herself immune to folly. He had the manner of a man who had seen more of the world than the clerks and petty merchants who usually rented rooms beneath her mother’s roof. He spoke French well, though with the faint grain of another tongue beneath it. He could make himself agreeable when he chose. More than that, he could make a person feel chosen by his attention.

That was one of his gifts. I saw it later in men who should have known better than to trust him.

He stayed three nights.

On the first night, men came for him after dark. Two Irishmen and a Scot, my mother thought, though she could not swear to it. One had fair hair and a mouth too quick for silence. One was broad, watchful, and less comfortable indoors. The third spoke little and kept his hat low. They entered by the side door and left before dawn. Their boots left mud on the stairs, and when my mother carried up fresh candles, she found the map on the table folded too late, as though someone had meant to hide it and changed his mind.

The map was of the western coast.

My mother did not ask.

On the second night, Donal O’Reilly came.

She knew his name because he gave it. He was older than my father, not old, but already settled into himself. He had a narrow face, dark hair, and the calm of a man who had been obeyed often enough to expect it. He did not swagger. He did not need to. Even my grandmother, who distrusted any man who dirtied her floor, lowered her voice when speaking to him.

‘Madame Morel,’ he said, bowing with surprising grace. ‘You keep a discreet house.’

‘Only when my guests deserve discretion.’

‘Then I must hope to deserve it.’

My father was behind him on the stair. My mother remembered that most clearly: the way Robbie watched O’Reilly, not with loyalty exactly, nor deference, but with the attention a younger wolf gives an older one when learning where to bite.

They took the upper room.

Their voices carried when they thought the house asleep.

At first my mother heard only fragments. Ireland. Bordeaux. Cargo. Names that meant nothing to her then. There was talk of men who had lost patience with kings, priests who carried letters inside devotional books, merchants who complained of taxes in daylight and sold powder by moonlight. Then my father’s voice sharpened.

‘You’re still speaking like an idealist.’

O’Reilly gave a low laugh. ‘And you speak as though that were a disease.’

‘It is, if it gets men killed.’

‘Men are killed by greed as often as by ideals.’

‘Greed feeds families. Ideals bury sons.’

O’Reilly did not answer immediately. My mother told me that, while she waited below, she imagined Robbie somewhere farther away, standing before graves no one in France had dug.

O’Reilly said, ‘You think of your brothers.’

‘I think of fools,’ my father replied.

‘They were your blood.’

‘They were boys taught to mistake death for honour.’

The floor creaked overhead. My mother should have moved away. Instead, she stood in the dark passage, a tray of clean linen in her arms, and listened.

‘Don was no fool,’ O’Reilly said.

‘Don led them where every fool in that cause was eager to go. John died in England. Callum at Sheriffmuir. Don fell at Glen Shiel, and Willie vanished there. Four sons poured into the mud and called heroes because the living cannot bear to call them wasted.’

‘Careful, Robbie.’

‘No. I’m sick of careful words. I had them all my life from old men by firesides. My father talks of honour. My mother talks of duty. Malcolm talks of standing firm. And my uncles and aunts — God preserve me from old kin with long memories and no vision. Fiona, Mairi, Gregor, Ewan. All of them guarding the same little circle of earth as if the world begins and ends at a farm gate.’

‘Killiecrankie Farm is not nothing.’

‘No,’ my father said. ‘It is a beginning. That’s all.’

O’Reilly’s chair scraped faintly.

‘A beginning of what?’

‘Something that lasts.’

‘A family farm can last.’

‘A farm can be taken, burnt, inherited by fools or lost through law, debt or one bad harvest. I want more than that.’

‘For yourself?’

‘For the name.’

‘The MacKail name?’

‘What other name matters?’

There it was. I did not hear those words myself, yet they have followed me all my life. What other name matters?

My mother said O’Reilly laughed then, quietly.

‘You pretend not to be an idealist, but you dream like one.’

‘I dream with open eyes.’

‘Empire, then?’

My father did not answer at once.

‘Call it what you like.’

‘Empire is a dangerous word for a farmer’s son.’

‘So is obedience.’

O’Reilly’s tone cooled. ‘An Scáth Dorcha does not exist to make kings of restless boys.’

‘No. It exists because kings and causes fail. That is why I came to you in the first place.’

‘You came because you wanted a path that did not run through your father’s fields.’

‘I came because you saw what others did not. That men can build power in shadow while fools wave banners in daylight.’

The words frightened my mother, though she would not confess it then. She had heard men boast before. Every lodging house in France had rooms full of exiled men who spoke as if the world had wronged them personally. But this was not tavern arrogance. My father’s voice was too measured for that. He was not dreaming aloud. He was arranging the future in his mind.

O’Reilly said, ‘There are lines, Robbie.’

‘Lines drawn by men afraid to cross them.’

‘Lines that keep us from becoming the thing we claim to resist.’

My father laughed once.

‘There. Idealism again.’

‘Call it conscience.’

‘Conscience is a fine servant and a useless master.’

That, I think, was the moment my mother began to fear him. The fear was not yet strong enough to make her leave or refuse him, but some part of her knew he had already stepped beyond the ordinary sins of young men.

Yet fear and fascination are closer cousins than decent people like to admit.

On the third day, O’Reilly left for Paris. The fair-haired Irishman, whom my mother later knew as John Gallagher, went with him. The broader one, William O’Connell, remained behind with my father, and the quiet man, Fergus Boyd, came and went twice before nightfall. Sealed packets and a pouch of coin changed hands, while a scrap of paper was burnt in the grate although the afternoon was warm.

That evening, my father found my mother in the little courtyard behind the house, where rainwater gathered in the cracked basin and rosemary grew stubbornly against the wall.

‘You heard us,’ he said.

She did not pretend not to understand.

‘Houses have thin floors.’

‘And you have sharp ears.’

‘A woman who keeps accounts must hear what men forget they have said.’

He stood beside her, close enough that she could smell rain on his coat and wine on his breath.

‘Then you know I am not a safe man.’

‘Safe men are seldom interesting.’

He smiled. ‘That sounds like something a foolish woman says before she suffers for it.’

‘And that sounds like something a dangerous man says when he wishes to be forgiven in advance.’

He studied her for a long moment. My mother told me that something of his guardedness left him, as though he had found in her not innocence but comprehension.

‘You understand more than you should.’

‘Perhaps you say more than you ought.’

‘No. I say what I choose.’

‘Then choose carefully.’

He took her hand. There was no grand declaration, no promise of marriage and no tenderness fit for songs. My mother was never foolish enough to dress the memory prettily. She said he kissed her as a man signs a bargain before he has read all its clauses: with appetite, confidence and no intention of being bound by anything he had not named himself.

By winter, she was carrying me.

She did not tell him at once.

There were reasons. Women always have reasons, though men prefer to call them mysteries. Robbie was absent often, moving between Saint-Germain, Paris, Bordeaux, and smaller towns whose names she learnt from mud on letters and the dialects of men who came looking for him. Donal O’Reilly’s name returned more than once. Gallagher appeared frequently, laughing too loudly below stairs and falling silent whenever my mother entered. O’Connell was polite in a way that made politeness seem threatening. Boyd hardly spoke at all.

My grandmother saw the truth first.

‘It is the Scot,’ she said.

My mother folded linen and said nothing.

‘Does he know?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Will he marry you?’

My mother laughed. That laugh, she told me, was the closest she came to weeping.

‘No.’

‘Then you must make him pay.’

‘He will.’

‘Money is not a name, Madeleine.’

‘No,’ my mother said. ‘But it buys bread.’

There are cruelties hidden in practical sentences. My grandmother was not unkind. She had buried one husband, two infants, and every illusion poverty had not already taken from her. She knew that a child without a father’s name entered the world owing a debt he had never incurred.

When my mother told Robbie, it was near Candlemas. Snow lay in old grey ridges along the street, and the rooms were never warm no matter how much wood was bought. He had returned late, his coat stiff with cold, his expression sharpened by some quarrel elsewhere.

She waited until he had eaten.

‘Robert,’ she said.

He looked up at once. She seldom used his name unless she wanted truth from him.

‘What is it?’

‘I am with child.’

He set down the cup in his hand.

For a while he did not speak. My mother watched him closely, searching for fear, anger, tenderness — anything by which she might measure him. What she saw instead was calculation interrupted by wonder.

‘Mine?’

She struck him.

The blow was not hard enough to injure him, but it made the answer unnecessary.

He accepted the blow without raising a hand. That was perhaps wise of him.

‘Forgive me,’ he said.

‘Do not ask forgiveness for what you meant to ask.’

He rubbed his cheek once, then stood and crossed to the window. The street beyond was white, the glass misted by candle heat. He rested one hand on the frame.

‘A son,’ he said.

‘You do not know that.’

‘I know.’

‘You hope.’

‘No. I know.’

There was something in his voice that chilled her more than anger would have done.

‘And if it is a daughter?’

He did not turn. ‘Then she will be provided for.’

‘How generous.’

‘Madeleine.’

‘No. Say what you mean.’

He faced her then, and she saw in him an excitement she had never seen before. It was not joy, for joy possesses humility, or ought to. This was triumph reaching for an object it had not yet earned.

‘If it is a son,’ he said, ‘he will be called Alexander.’

‘Will he?’

‘Yes.’

‘After whom?’

‘After Alexander the Great.’

She stared at him.

‘You would name a child after a conqueror?’

‘After a man who was not content with the patch of earth he inherited.’

‘Alexander died young and left his empire to be torn apart.’

‘He still built one.’

‘And this child is to do the same?’

‘He is to understand that a man is not bound by the smallness of his beginning.’

She folded her arms over herself, though whether from cold or protection she could not say.

‘And what beginning will you give him?’

‘Mine.’

‘Your name?’

He gave her no answer.

There, at last, was the limit.

My father could speak of empire, blood, inheritance, destiny, and greatness; but when my mother placed the plain word name before him, he stopped as though the floor had opened.

‘It is not simple,’ he said.

‘Names seldom are.’

‘I have obligations.’

‘To whom? Your father in Ireland? The farm you mock? The family you say thinks too small?’

His eyes hardened.

‘Do not mistake what you overhear for what you understand.’

‘I understand enough. You want a son called Alexander, but not loudly enough for him to be heard.’

‘That is not what I said.’

‘Then say it differently.’

He came back to the table and sat opposite her.

‘A MacKail name is not a coin I toss across a table.’

‘No. It is a door. You mean to keep it shut.’

‘I mean to keep him safe.’

‘From whom?’

He looked away.

That was how my mother knew there were enemies already: not distant governments or opponents of the Jacobite cause, but men who knew Robbie personally, dealt with him and watched him.

‘You are building something dangerous,’ she said.

‘Everything worth building has enemies.’

‘And our child?’

‘Will benefit from what I build.’

‘But not inherit your name.’

His patience frayed.

‘If I claim him now, I tie him to every risk I carry. Is that what you want? Men asking whose son he is, where his father goes, why certain Irishmen visit his mother’s house at night? You think a name protects? Sometimes it marks the throat.’

She wanted to believe that. Part of her did. It is easier to endure rejection when it dresses itself as caution.

‘Then what do you offer him?’

‘Money. Education. Protection.’

‘And a name chosen by you but carried by me?’

‘Alexander.’

‘No,’ she said.

He stared at her.

‘No?’

‘If he is born from my body and must bear my name, then I will choose what he is called.’

‘Madeleine—’

‘He may have Alexandre, if you must leave your shadow on him, but it will not be his first name. The name by which I call him to table, soothe him in fever and teach him to answer the world will be mine to choose.’

His face changed in a way she never forgot. Pride struck pride, and for a moment neither yielded.

‘What name, then?’

She thought of light through chapel glass and perhaps of a martyr’s name, though she was no great scholar of saints. She wanted something clear, French and hers.

‘Lucien,’ she said.

He looked displeased.

‘Lucien Alexandre Morel.’

‘Morel.’

‘Yes.’

‘A clerk’s name.’

‘A clean one.’

He flinched at that, though only in the eyes.

‘You wound neatly,’ he said.

‘I learnt from men who do it clumsily.’

Then, to her surprise, he laughed. The anger did not vanish, but it rearranged itself. He admired resistance when it did not obstruct him too much.

‘Lucien Alexandre,’ he repeated.

‘Morel.’

He leaned back.

‘For now.’

Those two words stayed with her: for now. I have never known whether he meant them as a promise or a threat. Perhaps he did not know himself.

I was born on 29 September 1726, near midnight, while rain beat upon the roof and Madame Élodie Morel prayed with one hand on the bedpost and the other gripping a rosary polished smooth by grief.

My mother said I did not cry at once.

That pleased my father when he was told of it. He was not present at the first moment. Men like Robbie MacKail are often absent from the beginnings of things for which they later claim credit. He came an hour after, wet to the knees, with a cut across one knuckle and a darkness about him that made my grandmother cross herself when he turned away.

‘A boy?’ he asked.

My mother was pale, sweating, exhausted, and angrier than any saint painted on a chapel wall.

‘Yes.’

He approached the bed.

I was wrapped in linen, red-faced, silent, and utterly unaware that my existence had already disappointed and satisfied him in equal measure.

‘Alexander,’ he whispered.

‘Lucien,’ my mother corrected.

He looked at her.

‘Lucien Alexandre Morel,’ she said. ‘You agreed.’

‘I agreed to hear it.’

‘Then hear it again.’

My grandmother, who feared him less than she should have done, stepped forward and placed herself between the bed and my father.

‘The child has been entered in the parish register as Lucien Alexandre Morel. Son of Madeleine Céleste Morel.’

My father’s eyes moved to her.

‘And the father?’

‘Not named.’

Robbie’s hand stopped above the blanket.

Perhaps that was the first mercy I was given: not that my father was absent from the register, but that my mother had the courage to leave the space empty rather than fill it with a lie.

Robbie looked down at me. My eyes were closed. My fists were tight. He reached out one finger and touched the side of my face.

‘He has my mouth,’ he said.

‘God help him,’ my grandmother muttered.

My mother heard it. So did he. For once, he let it pass.

He came often in the weeks after my birth, though never predictably. He paid the midwife. He brought linen, coin, a small carved horse from a market stall, and once a silver spoon too fine for our table. He held me awkwardly at first, then with a concentration that unnerved my mother. He studied me as though waiting for signs of conquest. I gave him wind, sleep, and the usual complaints of infants. Even so, he seemed satisfied.

‘He’ll be strong,’ he said.

‘He is a baby,’ my mother answered.

‘Strength begins before a man knows its name.’

‘You speak nonsense very confidently.’

‘Most truths sound like nonsense to those who have not needed them.’

He said such things often. They were impressive to strangers and tiresome to women who had to boil linen.

Yet there were moments — I must be honest — when my mother believed he loved me. His love was neither gentle nor selfless, but some fierce, proprietary feeling existed in him that came as close to love as he could manage. He would sit by the window with me in his arms and speak too low for anyone but her to hear.

‘You won’t be small,’ he told me once. ‘Do you hear me, lad? You won’t be one of those men who waits for another man’s permission. You’ll not die in a field because some prince needs bodies. You’ll not spend your life mending fences around another man’s dream.’

‘He is three weeks old,’ my mother said.

‘Then he has time to learn.’

‘To learn what?’

He looked at her, and for once there was no mask.

‘That survival is not enough.’

This was the contradiction at the heart of him. To others, he preached survival as the only cause that mattered; in private, he despised survival without power. He scorned farming but coveted the farm in Ireland, condemned his brothers’ deaths while demanding that their blood enlarge the MacKail name, and wanted a son protected from his dangers yet marked by his ambition.

And in his arms, nameless to him and named by my mother, I slept.

As winter thinned into a bitter spring, Robbie’s visits became less frequent. When he came, he carried more money and less ease. Men asked for him at odd hours. Letters arrived under names my mother was warned not to remember. Donal O’Reilly came once more and stood in the courtyard with my father while I lay in a cradle near the kitchen hearth.

My mother watched them through the window.

O’Reilly looked older than before, or perhaps only more disappointed.

‘You are moving too quickly,’ he said.

‘I am moving while others hesitate.’

‘You are making enemies among men who once trusted you.’

‘Then they trusted too easily.’

‘Do you hear yourself?’

‘I hear a man tired of being slowed by scruples dressed as wisdom.’

O’Reilly glanced towards the house. My mother moved back, but not before she saw his eyes rest on the cradle through the glass.

‘And the child?’ he asked.

My father turned.

‘What of him?’

‘Does he know the sort of world his father prepares for him?’

‘He knows milk and sleep.’

‘That is all children should know.’

‘Spare me your tenderness, Donal.’

O’Reilly’s face hardened.

‘There was a time when I thought you might be useful because you had no illusions. I begin to wonder whether you have replaced them with worse.’

My father stepped closer to him.

‘And I begin to wonder whether you mistake command for ownership.’

‘An Scáth Dorcha is not yours.’

‘Not yet.’

The words were quiet. My mother said she felt them more than heard them.

O’Reilly stared at him for a long time.

‘Be careful, Robbie.’

My father smiled faintly.

‘I am always careful.’

That was the last time my mother saw Donal O’Reilly as a free man.

Within months, rumours moved through the house of an arrest in Bordeaux, false papers and a charge no one could describe clearly. Men loyal to O’Reilly vanished or went to ground. Gallagher came one night with blood on his cuff. O’Connell arrived at dawn and left with two sealed packets. Boyd watched the street from behind the curtain while my father burnt papers in the grate.

My mother held me in the back room and did not ask questions.

At last Robbie came to her near midnight. He looked tired but not defeated, and that distinction mattered. A defeated man might have sought comfort; Robbie carried the grim composure of someone whose plan had succeeded at a cost he did not intend to discuss.

‘You must leave this house for a while,’ he said.

My mother stood with me in her arms.

‘Why?’

‘Because I say so.’

‘That answer is for men who command soldiers, not for women holding your child.’

He looked at me then, and the anger checked itself.

‘There may be searches. Questions. Men looking for those connected with me.’

‘Connected how? By business? By blood? By sin?’

‘Madeleine.’

‘Is Donal O’Reilly dead?’

‘No.’

‘Imprisoned?’

His gaze moved away from her.

My mother closed her eyes briefly, having received her answer.

‘What have you done?’

‘What was necessary.’

‘Necessary for whom?’

‘For the future.’

‘Yours?’

‘His.’ He pointed at me.

She almost laughed, though nothing in her was amused.

‘Do not put your sins in his cradle.’

He stepped nearer.

‘You think me cruel.’

‘I think you are becoming what you once despised.’

His face tightened.

‘You don’t know what I despise.’

‘Yes, I do. Weakness. Failure. Men who die for causes. Old kin who remember better men than you. Anyone who sees a line and refuses to cross it merely because it is wrong.’

For a moment, I think she frightened him. Not because she had power over him, but because she had seen him without needing proof.

‘Pack what you need,’ he said at last. ‘A carriage will come before dawn. You’ll go to your aunt near Chartres. Stay there until I send word.’

‘And you?’

‘I have work.’

‘Of course you do.’

He reached into his coat and placed a purse on the table, heavier with coin than any sum she had held before.

‘For you and the boy.’

‘The boy has a name.’

He looked at me.

‘Lucien,’ he said, as though testing whether the word could be made to obey him.

‘Yes.’

His gaze lingered. Then, very softly, he added, ‘Alexandre.’

That was the nearest he came to blessing me.

Before dawn, my mother left Saint-Germain-en-Laye with my grandmother, two trunks, a frightened maid and a child too young to know that his life had already been uprooted. We went first to Chartres, then to a smaller village beyond it, where my great-aunt kept hens, scolded priests, and believed every foreigner carried plague, debt, or both.

My father did not send word for six weeks.

When he did, the letter contained no apology. Only money, instructions, and one sentence my mother kept for years though she claimed to have burnt it. After that, word came rarely, and never in a form that admitted where he was. By the time I was old enough to ask, he had already crossed back into the life that would take him first to Dublin and then to Killiecrankie Farm.

He is safer as Morel for now.

For now again.

That was how my life began: with a hidden father, a contested name, and the shadow of a man in prison whom I would not understand until much later.

As a child, I knew none of this. I knew my mother’s hand, my grandmother’s voice, the creak of shutters, the smell of ink, soap, onions, and rain. I knew that some subjects closed a room faster than winter. I knew that when men came asking after Robert MacKail, my mother became very still. I knew that in a small box beneath her folded linen lay a carved wooden horse, a silver spoon, and a scrap of tartan dark as dried blood.

I knew, too, that my mother sometimes watched me when she thought I slept.

Her expression held affection, but fear was never far beneath it.

Years later, when I asked her why she had never told me plainly who I was, she answered with a question.

‘Would it have helped you, Lucien?’

I thought of Ireland, the stone bridge and the journey that eventually brought me face to face with my father. By then, the truth of my birth would be only one of the secrets between us.

‘No,’ I said.

She nodded.

‘Then I was right to wait.’

But mothers cannot wait forever. Nor can sons remain unnamed by their blood.

I was Lucien Alexandre Morel. That was the name written in the parish book, the name spoken by my mother, the name by which neighbours knew me and priests blessed me. Beyond the sea, in a country I had never seen, stood a farm called Killiecrankie. My father regarded its fields as the beginning of an empire, although he despised the old people who guarded them and called his dead brothers’ sacrifice a waste. Above all, there was the family name he had refused to give me.

MacKail.

I did not yet know the word as a hunger. I knew only that one day I would have to cross the sea and discover why it had been withheld.

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