Come in from the Cold

Wartime love and murder throw a long shadow. In 1942 John Elliott, a naval officer on the Arctic convoys supplying Russia, returns to Scotland a sick man and is billeted on feisty nineteen-year-old Mhairi Mackenzie to recuperate. After his two young sons are killed by a German bomb, John Elliott himself dies when his ship is torpedoed, leaving his wife ravaged by grief and guilt. Mhairi, too, is devastated by John’s death which exposes her to the blackmail of a dangerous and manipulative man. Pregnant but unmarried, she faces the condemnation of her community and when her violent father returns from war, she flees with her baby son to a new life as a ‘war widow’ and an eventual loveless marriage. John Elliott’s granddaughter Annie cannot provide an heir for her husband. Humiliated and bruised by her divorce, she retreats to Scotland to research her grandfather’s mysterious wartime history. Based in a cottage belonging to Mhairi Mackenzie’s family, she meets David, widowed father of two sons and grandson of Mhairi. Still grieving his wife, he seems unable to move on with either life or relationships, although he is intrigued by Annie’s discovery of a connection between his grandmother and Annie’s grandfather. As their friendship begins to deepen, the hidden memories of ninety-year-old Mhairi are peeled away and dark secrets surface—a doomed wartime love and the consequences of a killing which reverberates into the present day.Soon Annie has an astonishing and daunting secret of her own but the penalty of keeping silent is the shattering of her fragile relationship with David. Situations and circumstances echo down three generations and Annie and David must navigate rough seas towards healing and reconciliation. Neither are certain that they will ever come in from the cold.

Charlotte Milne spent her childhood in the Scottish Borders and considers herself Scottish although she lives near Southampton in order to be reasonably useful to her children and seven grandchildren. She and her husband now spend several months a year at their cottage in Wester Ross in Scotland. She trained as a secretary but though her typing speed is excellent, it still takes some years to produce a book. Her career included work with the National Trust for Scotland, two years in Uganda as Assistant to the Dean of Makerere University and Personnel Manager (now called Human Resources....) at Leasco in London, in the early days of computers when they took up an entire room. The rest was as wife, mother, grandmother, gardener, chauffeur, chief bottle washer, etc.