“Then I hope you will be kind to your uncle,” Mr. McKeith said.
“I’ll try,” Mary-Rose promised. “It’ll be very exciting to see the big walls and the towers that Dadda told me about. They are still – there?”
She asked the question anxiously and Mr. McKeith assured her that they were.
*
Afterwards, Fiona found it very difficult to remember her feelings, much less to analyse them, as she packed up the house that had been her home for the last five years and where she had expected to stay indefinitely looking after Mary-Rose.
She was sixteen when her father had died and she had found herself alone.
She and Rosemary had lost their mother when they were small children and their father had never been the same after her death.
He had been comparatively elderly when he had married for the se
