Page 6 of Bonetide

I open the sketchbook and sit there for a long moment with my hand on the page, letting myself feel what I’m feeling, which is the strange, slightly embarrassing recognition of someone else’s work as kin to my own. The line is the same line. The discipline is the same discipline. Effie painted the way I did, with a watercolor wash laid down first and the ink work over the top, and her plants are accurate the way mine are accurate—every leaf-margin counted, every venation correct, every flower drawn from at least three angles on the same page so the structure can be understood.

I had no idea she did this.

I had no idea anyone in my family did this except me.

I think about my dad, because my brain will not be stopped from thinking about him in a moment like this. He didn’t tell me. One would think he would have mentioned that this artistic leaning runs in the family. I don’t know whether it’s because he didn’t know, didn’t think to, or because he chose not to, but I can’t ask him now and I hate that.

I close the sketchbook gently and put it aside. I’ll look at it properly later.

The notebooks are mostly mundane on the surface. Plant lists by month. Weather notations. A diary of sorts that runs in fits and starts across decades. The sketches are gorgeous and I set them aside to study later because they’re going to teach me things about this landscape no one else can. I’m halfway through a notebook from the eighties when something falls out of the back of it and lands on the kitchen floor.

A single sheet of paper, folded twice.

I pick it up, unfold it, and, for whatever reason, the back of my neck goes cold.

It’s a list of names.

The writing at the top of the page seems very old, carefully drawn in copperplate, the kind someone learned at a school desk a century ago. Below it, in handwriting I now recognize as Effie’s, the list continues. Some are first names only. Some are full names. Each is paired with a date; written in the small precise way you’d write dates in a ledger.

The earliest is from 1843.

The most recent is from 2025.

I count. There are forty-seven names.

The list isn’t in any obvious order. Some of them seem local: MacLeod, Ross, Cameron—Scottish names. But some aren’t. A Bridget Halloran. A Pavlina Kowalski. Maybe it’s a record of relatives, a family tree, or a list of people Effie knew? Then again, 1843 to 2025 is a hundred and eighty-two years, which is longer than any one person can have known anyone.

I put the list down on the table, pondering it.

Underneath the list, slipped between two notebooks, I find a loose sheet of cartridge paper.

Effie, I’m assuming, has drawn a horse on it.

The horse is pale grey and standing on a rocky shore. The water at its hooves is dark. Its mane is wet, hanging in heavy ropes. Somehow, she has captured the sense of the horse being absolutely still. Not just that she’s capturing a moment in time and freezing it forever, but that the horse itself is frozen in place.

There is no caption on the front. I turn it over.

In the same careful handwriting that wrote the list, my great-aunt has written: Came at low tide. Did not invite.

I read it again. Did not invite onto her property? Into the cottage? Into a horse-related arrangement of some kind? I set the drawing down on the table beside the list, face up, so the horse and the names are looking at me at the same time. I don’t know what I’m looking at. And for some reason, I’m pretty sure that I don’t want to know.

I’m so lost in the names and the uninvited horse that I almost miss the letter.

It’s tucked into the front of the same notebook the list fell out of, folded once, addressed again to me in Effie’s handwriting. The paper is heavy and cream and smells faintly of lavender. I open it.

Iris.

The salt is not for damp. Regardless, refresh it monthly and after the rain. Do not remove the horseshoes or the rowan tree.

Whatever he says he is, whatever he asks of you, do not let him in.

I knew when you were twelve.

I do hope you have a happy life here in some way.

I’m sorry.

Effie.