Set Me Free Read online

  In memory of Bill Walker, much loved and never forgotten.

  And in memory of Fraser Christison:

  Now you’ve seen

  The whole of the moon.

  Recipes from Set Me Free

  are available to download free at

  danielasacerdoti.co.uk

  and

  danielasacerdoti.com

  Acknowledgements

  This book was written through dark times, and I’m so thankful to the people who kept me going, who rooted for me and made me laugh even in the worst moments. Thank you Ross, Beth, Irene, Francesca, Edo, Alessandra, Alison Green, Joan and to my mum: I don’t know where I’d be without you all. And to the others who understood and kept me afloat: thank you; you know who you are. Also, thanks to the team around my writing, everyone at Black & White and Campbell Brown in particular for understanding a writer’s ups and downs. To my editors, Kristen, Karyn and the beautiful, warm, wonderful Janne, whose hard work means that my books can now be read in twelve languages. Thank you to Acair for allowing me to reproduce ‘The White Swan’, a poem that has always inspired me.

  Thank you to my new agent Ariella Feiner, and I raise a glass to my former agent Charlotte Robertson, who’s moved on to great things – thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to you both.

  A special thank you to Ivana Fornera, Rosa Frison and Flavia Spinello for helping me give you the best versions of Margherita’s traditional recipes.

  My musical thank yous are a bit short this time – while working on this book I only listened to Hebrides, a beautiful composition by Donald Shaw that makes me dream of wind and sea and frees my spirit. So thank you, Donald.

  Thank you, thank you, thank you to my readers and to the bloggers all over the world for loving Glen Avich and its people. I’m so glad I can take you there with me and I’m so grateful for your support of my storytelling

  Finally, most of all, thank you to my husband Ross and to my little boys, Sorley and Luca, my sky and my sun: it’s all for you – all of it, down to every breath I take. And Sorley, sorry, but as fun as it sounded, I haven’t been able to weave an abduction by aliens into this Glen Avich book – maybe the next?

  Daniela

  Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Poem

  Prologue: The boy who didn’t come home

  1 Miracle

  2 Leo

  3 A house of straw

  4 Aftermath

  5 Dawn

  6 Roots

  7 New moon

  8 The weight of years

  9 Somewhere to be

  10 Wandering

  11 Dust

  12 And there she was

  13 He stood there in the mist

  14 Butterfly summer

  15 Little love (1)

  16 Kindred spirits

  17 Ramsay Hall

  18 The gift

  19 Little love (2)

  20 Something was lost

  21 Still waters

  22 Time for us

  23 New beginnings

  24 Life itself

  25 Union

  26 Blooms

  27 Bread and roses

  28 I saw the dangers, yet I walked

  29 Falling into him

  30 Only the wind knows

  31 A leap of faith

  32 The bridge

  33 Ablaze

  34 Lara’s world

  35 Chill

  36 Nowhere

  37 Liberation

  38 Beyond the veil

  39 The moment I looked away

  40 To mend and to break

  41 The place we call home

  42 And so you see

  43 The ocean is too wide to swim (1)

  44 The ocean is too wide to swim (2)

  45 Every silence has an end

  46 Voices

  Epilogue: Days of the dancing

  Copyright

  An Eala Bhàn (The White Swan)

  By Donald MacDonald of Coruna

  Sad I consider my condition

  With my heart engaged with sorrow

  From the very time that I left

  The high bens of the mist

  The little glens of dalliance

  Of the lochans, the bays and the forelands

  And the white swan dwelling there

  Whom I daily pursue

  Maggie, don’t be sad

  Love, if I should die

  Who among men

  Endures eternally?

  We are all only on a journey

  Like flowers in the deserted cattle fold

  That the year’s wind and rain will bring down

  And that the sun cannot raise

  All the ground around me

  Is like hail in the heavens

  With the shells exploding

  I am blinded by smoke

  My ears are deafened

  By the roar of the cannon

  But despite the savagery of the moment

  My thoughts are on the girl called MacLeod

  Crouched in the trenches

  My mind is fixed on you, love

  In sleep I dream of you

  I am not fated to survive

  My spirit is filled

  With a surfeit of longing

  And my hair once so auburn

  Is now almost white

  Good night to you, love

  In your warm, sweet-smelling bed

  May you have peaceful sleep and afterwards

  May you waken healthy and in good spirits

  I am here in the cold trench

  With the clamour of death in my ears

  With no hope of returning victorious

  The ocean is too wide to swim.

  Courtesy of Comann Eachdraidh Uibhist a Tuath (North Uist Historical Society).

  Prologue

  The boy who didn’t come home

  1916, Glen Avich

  I was eighteen when I went to war. Many of us came from Glen Avich: men, and boys too. Mothers and girlfriends and wives and sisters and daughters cried as we went. We didn’t dwell on the fact that some of us would not make it back; we knew, but we just didn’t think about it. I, for one, would certainly return. I was so young I felt immortal, immune to the laws that rule the rest of humanity.

  The journey from Glen Avich to Edinburgh, where we would be put on trains and sent south, and then further on towards the battlefields of Europe, seemed endless. Most of us had only ever gone as far as the next village, on foot or by bicycle. We stuck together, us Glen Avich men, pretending to be unfazed by our destiny unfolding, pretending that war didn’t frighten us. We were given boots; they were heavy to walk in, they seemed indestructible. Little did we know how flimsy those boots would turn out to be after endless walks in the mud and snow, how sore and bloody our feet would become and how cold they would get as the ice seeped through our flesh and turned it blue. Little did we know about the gas that tears your lungs, about the shrapnel that tears your flesh, about how it feels to see grown men cry and call for their mothers. We knew nothing of all that, yet.

  We stood in a little cluster, surrounded by men and boys from all over Scotland, some speaking English, some Gaelic. Women and children were there, too, accompanying their husbands, fathers, sons. Promise and hope hung in the air. We would all be back victorious, the propaganda promised us. The war would be short, and we’d be fighting for the greater good. A quick campaign, and we would be back home, crowned in glory.

  But some of us knew that nothing comes without time and toil; some of us suspected that there would be a higher price to pay than we’d been told. It was a thought in the back of our minds, an omen of much pain to come.

  When the trains took off, the women and childre
n waved and cried at the edge of the tracks. It was goodbye to Scotland. But of course I would be back, of course I would not die. I would see it through. Barbed wire and mines and gas and trench fever, they would not stop me from making it back. Nothing could stop me from going home.

  We saw foreign faces and heard foreign languages as we travelled south; it was the first time I had been among people who were not my own. Soon I would meet the enemies, and the rifles we’d been given would be used to injure and kill them. I’d only ever killed animals to be put on our table, and I wondered what it would be like to look into the eyes of a dying man, knowing that I’d been carrying the scythe that ended him.

  I lay awake at night listening to the rattling carriages, trying to dispel the images of fallen men from my head: men who would die at my hands. We all would kill, and some of us would be killed. Was the die cast for each of us? Was it already decided, who would make it back and who would be buried under a foreign sky? Around my neck there was a little chain with a medal of St Christopher, the patron saint of journeys; my mother had given it to me the night before I left. I held the chain in my hand as I lay awake, and wondered if St Christopher knew who would drown and who would be saved.

  So we went to a place that was cold, so cold, and there were no peat fires to keep us warm; a place where men and boys were shredded into pieces or gassed or lay fevered in muddy trenches. The threads of destiny were woven for each and every one of us, for the ones who would make it home, and for the ones who would never see Glen Avich again.

  1

  Miracle

  Margherita

  “I know I should make the best of a bad situation,” my husband said a summer evening of three years ago, a few days after I’d told him I was pregnant, when our baby was barely a speck inside me. “But I can’t help how I feel.”

  As I sat at the kitchen table in front of him, I found it impossible to wrap my head around the fact that he’d called our baby a bad situation. I rested a hand on my still-flat stomach, in an unconscious gesture of protection, and didn’t say anything, not then. I knew that if I opened my mouth at that moment I would not be able to control what came out and the conversation would turn into an argument in a matter of seconds.

  After we adopted our daughter, Lara, Ash didn’t want another child. But this baby had come along, unexpected like a bloom in winter, and there was nothing I could do – nothing I would do – to change that. I thought he would come round. I was sure he would. I was sure that as he saw my belly growing, as this baby slowly became a reality and not just two pink lines on a stick, he would accept him – or her. And then certainly he would grow to love this baby we’d made, whether he’d come to us by chance or by choice. Or by miracle, like I thought.

  “It’s all that comes with having a baby,” he continued. “The sleepless nights, and our lives being turned upside down, and all that hard work. I’m forty-five, Margherita. I don’t want all that any more.”

  “We never had it, Ash. We never had a baby before, so we don’t really know how it’s going to be,” I managed to say, too overwhelmed with disappointment to articulate more. I could have screamed, This is your baby! And you are a selfish, selfish bastard! Looking back, I wish I had. Oh, how I wish I had, instead of sitting there in shock, half-mute. But I didn’t know what was to come next; I still hoped that this was just fear talking and he would accept this baby in time.

  I was wrong.

  “Look,” said Ash. “I see my colleagues with new babies. They come to work on three hours’ sleep and their performance is affected. Everyone can see that.”

  “That’s inconvenient,” I muttered, thinking how it would feel to slap his face.

  “Oh, Margherita, it’s easy for you to be sarcastic, but we rely on this job. You aren’t working. I’ve been carrying this family for years.”

  I took the stab in silence once again. I had left my job when we adopted Lara. Before she entered our lives, I had been a pastry chef and I worked long hours, often into the night. Once Lara arrived, a six-year-old with a traumatic past, she needed me so much – she needed stability more than anything. She clung to me with all her might – she wouldn’t let me out of her sight, and every separation, even the smallest one, was overwhelming for her. Getting her used to her new school, to her new surroundings, to her new friends was a feat, and it took time and energy and an infinite amount of patience. Ash was never there; one of us had to be a consistent presence in her life. As much I loved being a stay-at-home mum, I missed my job and I resented being spoken to in those terms, as if somehow I didn’t pull my weight. I bit my tongue, feeling that all my good intentions of not turning this into an argument were dissolving quickly. I wondered how long it would be before I exploded.

  “Anyway. That’s not the point. I see Steven and Bea and their sons. They have no time for themselves, their house is always a tip, they never go on a decent holiday because they’re always broke.”

  Steven, Ash’s brother, wasn’t a happy man for sure, but it had nothing to do with the upheaval of having two little boys close together, I thought. He was simply one of those people unable to be happy, for some reason, and I’d long realised that Ash was the same. If that had something to do with having a controlling, hyper-critical mother – my not-so-dear mother-in-law – who’d suffocated them both all their lives, I can’t tell. All I knew was that Ash and Steven were always unsatisfied, always squirming in their skins, as if they weren’t that fond of the people around them, and themselves as well. I’d always felt protective of Ash because of this. I’d hoped he’d learn to love himself as much as I loved him, but it never happened.

  Ash was forever seeking something, forever needing more – more success, a bigger house, a bigger car – and for this he’d work all hours of the day. I would have preferred fewer things, less status and more of his presence. He worked for a big insurance company with branches all over the world and he was climbing the ladder as quickly as he could. He just couldn’t stop. Whenever he was doing family things with us he was restless, as if there was always somewhere else he’d rather be, and always checking phone and e-mail like a major deal would come along any minute and he would miss it if he ever relaxed.

  That was Ash. And I used to love him.

  I know it’s a cliché, but I loved him from the moment I saw him, desperate to impress, with his floppy blond hair falling on his face. We were playing golf, of all things. I loathe golf: the dress code especially drives me up the wall – what’s with the tartan trousers and the caps? But I was there for my sister Anna, who for some strange reason loves golf, and all other sports too. As for me, I’m hopeless when it comes to pretty much anything resembling exercise.

  Anyway, I was twenty-five and nowhere near ready to settle down; Ash was ten years older and looking for someone. We were opposite in nearly every way, even in looks: I was small and Mediterranean, with my parents’ Italian skin and dark-brown hair. He was tall and blond and thoroughly English. He was restless, I was peaceful; he was tense, I was serene. I think that in me he found peace; and in him I found a sense of purpose, of resolve, that was alien to me.

  My dad always said I was the sun in my own solar system, self-sufficient and independent. Love took me by surprise. It ambushed me. I fell in love with Ash. I never thought I could love anyone as much as I loved him.

  And now there we were, years later, discussing a baby that was all I’d prayed for and that for him was somehow an inconvenience.

  My eyes searched his face. “I don’t understand. Why is this so terrible? I know you didn’t want any more children, but it’s happened, and why can’t we just get on with it and be happy?”

  “Happy? Margherita, I’m forty-five. When this child is ten years old, I’ll be fifty-five. When he’s twenty—”

  “Yes, I can do the maths,” I said quietly. “A lot of people have children later in life. Especially men . . .”

  “This was going to be our time to have some fun, Margherita. Go on holidays. See a
bit of the world . . . What exactly can you do with a baby in tow?”

  I couldn’t quite take in the absurdity of what he was saying. Going on holidays? Having fun? We barely saw him. When he had a rare break from work, he went on golfing trips with his brother. When exactly was going to be our family time?

  “Well, Ash, what do you want me to do? There were two of us when this happened,” I said, gesturing to my belly. My jeans would soon be too tight, my breasts full and tender. “I didn’t plan this, Ash. You know that. We thought it was impossible . . .”

  “I know you didn’t plan it. It was stupid of us not to take precautions. We should have done.” He rubbed his forehead with his fingers and looked at me. I noticed with dismay that his clear blue eyes were hard, harder than I’d ever seen them. He was saying he didn’t blame me, but his eyes told a different story.

  “We didn’t take any precautions for years, and it never happened,” I said in a low voice. “We’d taken every test under the sun. Nobody knew why we weren’t conceiving. This was a complete surprise.” In spite of the circumstances, a little bubble of delight at my good luck burst inside my heart.

  “Well, we don’t have to just go with whatever happens,” he said, his tone even, sensible all of a sudden. “We can make choices.”

  I felt cold.

  “What choices?” I asked, hoping with all my being that he didn’t mean what I thought he meant.

  He looked down, as if he were ashamed to say it.

  “There are other options, Margherita.”

  He saw my horrified face, and again he looked away. Suddenly my husband’s familiar face looked that of an enemy’s.

  “Look, I’m sorry if that sounded harsh—”

  I stood up and ran out of the room. The discussion was over. He didn’t follow, like part of me hoped he would. He didn’t run after me to say he didn’t mean it, that it was okay, that we would raise this child together. All that followed was silence, as often happened with Ash. Silence. Like he never had enough time, enough energy to spare words for me.