Chapter One ~1885

Isa McNaver walked blithely along the seashore.

The sun was warm on her head and the wind just moved her hair off her forehead.

Because there was nobody to see her, she wore nothing on her head and, having taken off her shoes, carried them in her hand.

She could feel the wet sand and the waves lapping gently over her feet.

She thought as she had so often before that there was no place lovelier in the world than Scotland.

Most particularly the little bit of it that she thought of as her own because she had always lived there.

When she was away, as she had been during the last two years, she had never gone to sleep without thinking of the purple heather on the moors.

She dreamed of the mists over the distant mountains and the sea shimmering golden in the sunshine or silver in the moonlight.

‘I am home! I am home.’

She wanted to cry the words aloud to the young gulls that flew overhead and the cormorants perched on the rocks jutting up above the surface of the sea.

She felt a little throb of her heart as she remembered that, if her voice did not recover quickly, she would have to go back to the South and find some other way of earning her living.

When she was seventeen and at school in Edinburgh, it was discovered that she had an exquisite soprano voice.

It had made her the leader of the choir in the local Kirk.

A theatrical impresario had quite by chance attended Morning Service there one Sunday and, having heard her sing, had asked the Minister to introduce him to Isa.

To her astonishment he informed her that she had a voice in a million.

He added that he was prepared to take her to London and produce her at a Concert that he was arranging where Her Majesty Queen Victoria would be present.

It was all like something out of a fairy story.

But Isa’s parents were shocked and horrified at the idea of her appearing on a stage.

At first Colonel Alister McNaver had refused point-blank to consider such a proposition.

But when the impresario told him how much he was prepared to pay Isa, he was forced, because he was in desperate need of money, to agree.

Isa had finished her term at school and had then set off for London.

It was arranged for her to stay with one of her mother’s sisters who had been no less horrified at the thought of any relation of hers being connected with the stage.

She, however, realised that Isa was singing in public solely in order to help her father and mother.

She was to be chaperoned from the moment she left the house until the moment she returned.

She never went anywhere unless she was accompanied by her aunt or else by her aunt’s companion, who was if anything even more puritanical than her employer.

Isa was actually not in the least interested in the many invitations she received from the admirers of her voice.

In any case, whether they were young or old, rich or poor, they were not permitted to become acquainted with her.

The only people she was allowed to meet in London were her aunt’s friends, who were mostly old and dull.

Also, as Isa thought secretly to herself, tone deaf.

However, she was a success!

During the last two years she had been able to send home quite a considerable amount of money earned from the Concerts arranged for