The Tangling of the Web by Millie Gray Read Free Book Online Page A

best, but she was all we had.’
    Josie began sobbing again. Mother, she thought. That bitch that we call mother got my precious letters ten years ago. She opened them. Read them. Could have given me peace and joy and yet she let me suffer. Prolonged my agony, she did. Why? Dear God, please tell me why?
    By sheer force Sally had dragged Josie into the living room, and sitting her down on a chair and massaging her hands, she confided, ‘Look, Flora and I didn’t say, but Sweet William is leaving in a fortnight. His dad has died and he’s going back to Smithton to run the croft for his mother.’ What Flora and Sally had never told Josie was that William’s father had turned him out of Smithton when he discovered that William was homosexual, but now he was gone William could go back to where his heart had ever been.
    ‘But what has William leaving to do with me?’ speered Josie.
    ‘Just that Flora and I think that you should take over the wee basement flat when he vacates it. But no running backwards and forwards and leaving me with no rent while you do another season. You’re twenty-five now. It’s time to put down roots. You need to get a permanent job and make a life for yourself.’
    Josie nodded.
    ‘Just one thing more.’ Sally hummed and hawed before adding, ‘And no men staying the night. This is a respectable home. Oh, look at the time, Harry will be home soon and he’s out singing tonight.’
HARRY’S STORY
1924
    When Harry was just a wee lad of seven, he couldn’t believe that at last it was holiday time from Lorne Street primary school.
    This meant that sharp at six o’clock tomorrow morning he and his mother would be travelling on the train from Edinburgh to Inverness and then on to Smithton, Culloden. The journey to Smithton would be by pony and trap, an extravagance according to his mother, but as Granny had ordered the coachman to pick them up she had to thole it. Once they arrived at Granny’s croft house, he knew his mother would moan about having to pay for the last leg of their journey. ‘Mother,’ she would exclaim, ‘we have travelled all the way from Edinburgh to Inverness and not a penny has it cost us …’
    ‘Aye,’ Granny would butt in, ‘because with your Colin working on the railway you get free passes for the trains, which are paid for by fare-paying customers like me.’
    Flora wouldn’t respond to her mother’s gripe except to say, ‘And with what that highwayman charged me I wish to goodness the train lines extended to here.’
    The other bonus with not having to pay for the train was when they boarded at Edinburgh, Harry’s mother, wishing to appear prosperous, would proceed to the dining car and order breakfast. This was the place those who were considered to be doing ‘better’ dined. The tables were adorned with white starched table linen and brightly polished silver knives and forks. The menu was good and varied, but all Mum ever ordered for both of them was one plate of bacon and eggs with plenty of bread and tea.
    Often Harry vividly recalled that when the train stopped at all the stations with the grand-sounding names, like Pitlochry, Kingussie, Aviemore and Daviot, with its quaint little church, he would count the number of people who got off the train and how many got on. He also liked to see everyone who would be boarding with hens, chickens and ducks in cages.
    Harry loved going to visit his granny. Her croft house front windows looked down over the Black Isle, and a short five-minute walk through the woods at the back of the house meant Harry could be standing on the Culloden battlefield. It wasn’t the tourist attraction then that it would become later, so in solitude he could play among the tombstones that marked the graves of the brave clansmen – his ancestors who were slaughtered there. Often he wondered about the stones that marked the graves of ‘mixed clans’. Was it that they were from different clans or was it that parts of mutilated bodies