There’s hardly any need for a lamp, with that great moon shining down through the broad window. Frances sits at the desk writing, and the yellow light from the lamp beside her only tinges the white moonlight as they both fall across the black-bordered paper. For the last several minutes she’s constantly been finding her head raising itself from the letter, her eyes returning to the moon and her mind drifting away from her task.
Now she stops, leans back in her chair and lays down the pen, the letter half-finished. No; the moon is wiser than this pen and this ink-pot and these conventional phrases, and she’ll do better to listen to it. Her friends tell her that keeping busy takes one’s mind off grieving, and perhaps it will eventually, but now she needs to think.
So she rises from the chair and paces back and forth across the room, looking round her at the strange world, black and bright silver, that the moon has made of it. The eeriness reassures her. It’s right that this place, where Louis used to sit, writing at the desk as she was doing just now, should have lost its familiar appearance and become something weird. Otherworldly?...
It would perhaps be strange if someone with Frances’s experience of life had remained quite a conventionally pious Christian; and then Louis wasn’t that either. She isn’t sure about Heaven. But she is sure—and the strength of the conviction surprises her a little—that Louis is in some way still there. He’s... a little further along the path ahead of her, perhaps—watching for her, waiting, smiling.
The moonlight glints on the polished brass of the grate, speckles the rough upholstery of the armchair, lies in broad beams across floorboards and rug... and picks out the silver and gold lettering along the spines of the books on the shelf above the desk. Frances stops pacing and stands regarding these. Louis’s spirit, if it is anywhere on earth, might be here: in these rather haphazardly-arranged volumes, a miscellaneous collection of editions from different publishers in different countries. Frances runs a finger over the books, feeling the titles while she reads them: Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Dynamiter (that one was a collaboration, and her own name is stamped on the spine beside his).... Kidnapped.
And here she pauses, lets her hand linger over the book a moment, and then reaching a decision, takes it down from the shelf. It does not have her name on the spine, for the actual writing of it was all Louis’s; but the story is hers too—specially so. She opens the book, wanders with it over to the window and begins to read the first chapter by the moonlight. A smile comes unbidden to her face; yes, that recipe for ‘lilly-of-the-valley water’ was one of those moments where she, as she used to put it, leant over Louis’s desk and made a little adjustment to the story. Turning over the pages, she reads a few more passages here and there. Here is the flight in the heather, and the danger and hardship and adventure of her own travels across America; and here is what makes this book most of all her own: the love story, Davie and Alan’s love story, that has in it so much of hers and Louis’s.
But—oh, Louis (she thinks), how sad you made the ending! Of course it could hardly have gone otherwise, whatever poor Davie might have wanted; Alan was a Jacobite, and he must go back to France, and they must twine. And, as she knows too well now, every love story must end in parting at the last. No author could find a way round that.
The idea comes to her practically fully-formed, as ideas sometimes do, as she stands there holding the book open at its final page. These books are only ink on paper; and yet they have a power, for all that. They are alive. This story lives beyond Louis—or rather, her first thought about the row of books was right: he is still living in it—and her own soul is in it too. She tells it, too. And that sad ending doesn’t have to be the ending. It’s not quite yet over.
She can’t write Louis back to life. But she can lean over his desk one last time—perhaps he’s standing there now, in the shadow of the moonlight, waiting for her to do so—and write Alan back into Davie’s.
With hurried and yet purposeful movement she sits back down in the chair, laying the open book upon the desk beside her, and pulls from a drawer a fresh few sheets of paper—not the black-bordered ones, this time—and takes up her pen and writes at the top of the first sheet the word: ‘EPILOGUE’.
She begins with the moon...
...And a hundred and thirty years ago, halfway round the world, the same moon shines in the same sky above the great house of Shaws. Its eerie light and shadows fall over the gardens and over the great expanse of folding hills beyond, and the light glitters with an almost speaking gentleness on the silver button on its chain in Davie’s hand. Amid the busy and (mostly) happy life of these days, it’s good—it’s a kind of relief—to come out here sometimes in the cool air and the silence, and be reminded that there are such things as moonlight and memory and ghosts.
Every detail of the button’s ornate design, as familiar to Davie as the hand that holds it, shows clear in the moonlight. It’s so quiet... He’ll just sit here for a while, on the wall at the end of the garden where you get such a clear view of the heather over the hills—it always reminded him of the heather in the Highlands—and think of the past.
And then a voice speaks out of the quietness.
‘Davie.’
And here Frances’s pen pauses in its progress, and she actually laughs. She has realised something. Louis did this before, didn’t he?... She turns to the book, opens it near the middle, flips over the pages until she finds the right place. Yes, here it is. Here is Davie at Aucharn, solemnly and heartbrokenly announcing Alan’s supposed death to James of the Glens in his cave; and then Alan, sidling up behind him, simply says, ‘Davie’...
‘It was one of your best moments, Louis,’ she says, speaking softly. ‘I always said so, didn’t I?... Well, I can’t do better now than go back to it.’ Go back to it—and make of it something new, something she can see better now, from where she’s standing on the path behind Louis.
And so all the joy of that moment at Aucharn—a joy that he scarcely dares to believe in at first, but just stands there looking at it in amazement—comes to Davie’s heart again, multiplied a thousandfold. And then Alan is in his arms, holding him with a strength that insists on its own reality, and he believes in it. He was wrong, in fact, to think Alan ever truly, completely left him—as wrong as he was the first time. He’s been here all along.
‘Davie... Oh, but I have missed you,’ says Alan, and kisses him again, and they’re together; and all Davie’s past grief and sorrow are gone from him.
Frances lays down the pen. She’s not laughing any more, but she is still smiling—if smiling through tears. Writing can be a tricky business, as Louis and she have both found; but there are times when you know you have it right, and this is one of them.
‘Well, what do you think?’ she says. ‘I knew it could have a happy ending, after all. And I do think you’ll like this one.’
There’s no doubt in her heart as she puts the question. Even the slightly conscious defiance which has sometimes made up an element in her carriage of her own convictions is gone; she is simply, utterly certain.
So when she feels a hand laid on her shoulder, she’s not surprised or scared; trusting, she places her own hand over it, feels the well-known texture of the skin and shape of the fingers, and the warmth of it; and then she looks up—and knows that what she sees, if only for a moment in the moonlight, is as true as the words she has written.