Lowland Romance Collection - Books 1-3

Prelude

Should I tell you?

Should I tell you everything?

Should I tell you everything that happened, or should I leave out the terrible secrets, the shared guilt, and the intimacy and only mention the romance, and the eventual outcome, how I came to be here and how everything was changed?

I am not sure what would be best.

If I write the whole story, you might think less of me, and wonder that somebody with my past can be in such a position, but on the other hand, if I only tell the good parts, you will know only the face of me that I allow the world to see. No: you are my blood; you deserve the truth, and nobody can alter what has already happened.

So I shall tell everything; every single detail, the good, the bad and the passionate, then you may judge for yourself what kind of person I am. By the time you read this, all that will be left of me will be a memory whispering in the haunts of the hills, but maybe the autumn winds will carry the tune of my life. I hope so, for I have sung long and often here, the lifting songs of triumph, the soft sighs of love and the melancholic laments of loss.

You will never meet me, you girls and boys, but you may see my picture, hanging on the wall in its gilded frame. That is me, halfway up the stairs, with my favourite blue dress trim around my hips and my hair as black as coal. It is dyed of course, for I am a lady of advanced age, and a grandmother and great-grandmother and probably a great-great-grandmother by now, knowing what sort of things you youngsters get up to. A lady of my age is entitled to grey hair, but I demand my vanity, and I will have it, and the raven hair that was my curse and my pride.

So I am watching you whenever you mount these stairs, and you may look on me after you read my words, and know what adventures and misadventures I had, and from what stock you come. And when you leave this house and walk in the surrounding hills you will take a little bit of me with you, in your heart and in your mind and in your soul, I hope.

For these are my hills, more than anybody else"s, and here is my story. If you read it, you may perhaps not judge me too harshly. But remember always that I am part of you, so to condemn me is in great measure to condemn yourself.