The girl who saw beyond

The Reverend Drummond's diaries

Waking the memory of the past doesn't always need paranormal abilities. Reverend Drummond's diaries had slept in an armchair of the rectory, and perhaps they would have keep on sleeping, till the Doomsday, if a depopulated parish had not fallen to Reverend Brawandine's lot. To full the free days, more numerous of the desired, Roger had devoted himself to a minute examination of the archive. The most of the cards proved to be of no-interest or too deteriorated to be readable, and ended in the parish budget, under the item: "Sales of recyclable paper." Instead, the Drummond's diaries escaped the basket, thanks to a series of casual circumstances, like if an unknown power chose to make them reach the Twenty-first Century.

First, their pages had been hermetically closed in a box, whose padlock had been lost, so that to open it Roger must appeal to the smith of the nearest town. Seclusion shielded the papers by sun, wetness, woodworms and rodents, and they came back to the light, dried and yellowed, but perfectly readable again. Then, in the first page, the good Reverend Drummond told to have made acquaintance of some his parishioners, the Brawardine family, tenants of lord McShafton. The typically Scottish clan spirit of Roger was stirred and he chose not only to read his predecessor's memories, but to fully transcript them by computer, a work going on from years and again long to be complete.

In mare magnum of the Drummond manuscript, Roger found, according to his words, the stuff for ten novels, also if spread amidst an infinity of unessential little facts. But the story of Alan McShafton and Clarissa Ramsay particularly touched him, both for the little part played in it by one of his ancestors, and for its supernatural aspects. At last, it solved a mystery of the McShafton history: why Sir Alan went to America, fighting and dying for a king to which he never showed any sympathy.

Roger reckoned all the references of Reverend Drummond to the event in a separated file, a printing of which he gave me later. In the following months, I could leisurely examine the original manuscript and I can swear that the following pages are an exact rendering of it, also if the Reverend Drummond's ancient and almost vernacular language has been translated in modern English. But I must confess that, reading them the first time, I suspected to be in front of a skilful pastiche, like the Poems of Ossian, and that Roger Brawardine was a colleague of mine, a novelist even abler than I was.

I must add that some water-coloured sketches were alleged to the manuscript. Among them, there was a woman's bust that almost fell by my hands for the surprise. It could have been the perfect Lucy's portrait, besides the severe and almost cruel look, that my sweet friend not even could have feigned. That drawing was, to me, disquieting, like to see, in the movie, Spencer Tracy becoming Mr. Hyde only by force of facial miming. Under that unsmiling Jocund, there was a writing, Portrait of my sister Margaret, and the signature, Clarissa Ramsay.