A Very Highland Holiday - Kathryn Le Veque Page 0,22

to him. Hesitantly, he took it.

“H-He had a letter on him?” he asked.

“Aye,” Essich nodded. “From someone named James. I found it in a chest pocket, right against his heart.”

With the ring on his finger and the watch in one hand, James looked at the letter, feeling the impact of the reverend’s words. It was just as Johnathan’s letter had told him, how he kept a certain letter close to his heart in battle.

There was one in particular I kept in a pocket next to my heart because it meant a great deal to me.

Swallowing hard, James opened it up to see which letter it was that meant so much to Johnathan. The first thing he saw was a childish scrawl and he knew that it was a letter written by a very young boy. He recognized his own writing.

Lifting it into the light, he began to read.

You are a very mean boy, Johnny.

I want to cut you with my saber and slash you and kill you. If I sound like a Billy goat, then you look like a horse’s arse and I don’t care if you tell Mummy. You say very mean things to me and I don’t care because I am going to kill you. Someday you will be dead and I will be happy. I will draw a picture of me laughing and when you are in the ground, I hope the worms eat your eyeballs. Then I will dig you up and put more worms on you. When you go to heaven, God will see all of the worms in your eyeballs and when I go to heaven, I will see them also. Wait for me when you get to heaven so I can see the worms. If you do not wait for me, I shall be very angry.

Your brother who hates you,

James

Startled by the petulant message in a letter that Johnathan should keep so close to him, James started to laugh. He laughed so hard that tears streamed down his face, but these were tears of delight. That his brother had kept that querulous, silly letter with him, keeping it close to his heart through the years, meant the world to him. It literally meant everything. It was incredibly representative of their childhood, but it was also representative of the bond they shared throughout the insults and bad feelings and torment. It began to occur to James why Johnathan had kept the letter so close.

Wait for me when you get to heaven.

God… so ridiculous, yet so poignant. Johnathan kept a young boy’s plea close to his heart because it spoke of James’ true adoration for the brother he very much loved.

When he faced battle, that little request had fortified him.

“What does it say?” Gaira asked timidly. “Will ye tell me?”

James was still chuckling. “H-Here,” he said, handing it to her. “Y-You can see for yourself.”

Gaira took it and read through it, giggling as she came to the end. “Did ye really send such nasty things tae yer brother?” she gasped. “Ye were a naughty lad.”

James nodded, taking it from her and carefully folding it. “I-I was,” he said. “A-And he loved me for it, so I suppose I wasn’t as naughty as I thought. To see that this silly little letter meant something to him… it is a feeling I cannot begin to describe. All I know is that I love it.”

Gaira smiled at him and he winked at her before returning his attention to the reverend. When he looked at the man, his chuckles started anew.

“I-I am the James of that letter, as you may have guessed,” he said. “I-I wrote that letter to my brother when I was around six or seven years of age, I believe, and he was nearing twelve. We had quarreled because he told me that I sounded like a goat when I spoke. I’d forgotten that I’d even written him that letter. How surprising to find that it meant so much to him.”

Essich was smiling, mostly because he was pleased that something in this horrific circumstance had brought James pleasure.

“The bond between brothers is unique and powerful,” he said. “It would seem that ye and yer brother shared that bond.”

James’ smile faded. “We did,” he said. “T-The strange thing is that I did not even realize that until I came to find him. I-I always thought we did not understand one another, but I was wrong. So very wrong. The important thing is that I have found my