EXCERPT

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On a cliff in Scotland a six-year-old boy stands staring across the river’s mouth. The rain lashes, freezing, towards the hated England one half mile away to the south. To his left, in the east, the waves roar on the grey vastness of the ocean. The ferocity of its current will tear him into the future as a hero, a murderer, a traitor, a lover, a fighter, an underdog, a pirate, a genius, and a man dead before forty-five.

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The wind whips at his cheek with its scent of salt and mystery, the rain tastes of distance and future, of the unexplored edges of seascapes and danger. As tangible as the sodden heather under his feet, a magnet pulls him eastwards. 

 

“John! ...stop standing there like a statue." His father’s voice shouts, hoarse above the wind. “Will ye come to the garden now! There’s work to do before nightfall."

 

Annoyed, John Paul inhales a lungful of air, seizes a final gaze across the water, and saunters slowly towards the vast garden of Arbigland House. His father is pushing a spotless wheelbarrow. The soil, packed solid with the dark richness of lowland Scottish peat, runs in furrows across the manicured vastness of the garden.

 

He picks up a spade and a hoe and copies his father’s motion as he buries the sprouting potatoes under the soil.