Sepia and Spice
Inside were letters, so many letters, in the pale blue fountain-pen ink of her grandmother.
It had been strange to wake in the spare room to the clatter of baking pans and the smell of cinnamon-rich pastry. The bed and the view were familiar to Liz, but beyond the embroidered eiderdown, the dressing table, and the floral pelmet, so much else had changed by that dour autumnal morning. The once-quiet street was now home to a bustling, trendy bakery. It had crept in sometime between her last few visits to this semi-residential street and, in many ways, taken over. Queue greeters in candy-striped aprons assured tourists and local scenesters that the wait would be worth it, while gently reminding - imploring - that pastries should not be munched, nor buttery flakes left, on the carefully swept steps of the neighbouring properties.
Liz had prevaricated over a second cup of tea in the kitchen, where vanilla pods and cocoa powder still fell from the sugar cupboard every time she reached for a single cube. She’d leafed through the copious junk mail addressed to her parents - circulars they’d never read, cruises they’d never take. Eventually, with a fresh coffee from the machine her father had never mastered, she was making her way back to the attic to continue what she’d started.
By now, the hum from the bakery queue was a pleasant background murmur. The buttery, nutty smell gave it away: it must be Thursday, and the pastries would be ready soon. The menu rotated through the week; today would be pecan tart - the most popular of all. Their aroma crept through the adjoining wall, bringing the faintly sweet aroma of warm dough into the attic.
Liz had resolved to tackle the old roll-top desk tucked behind two incomplete artificial Christmas trees and three boxes labeled “Xmas Decs” in her father’s bold cursive. The desk was unfamiliar. She didn’t remember it from childhood, from any of her mother’s renovations, or even her plaintive pleas for help listing old items on eBay. It had clearly sat in the attic for some time - covered with a lightly stained dust sheet, catching slanted sunlight from the apex vent.
The left-hand drawer stuck but eventually yielded to her insistence, releasing an olfactory rush of dusty old paper and the faintest hint of rose, with a single translucent petal pressed between the pages. It fluttered to the floor, curling as it fell. These scents - the latter so unfamiliar in this space - entwined with the spices drifting up from the bakery and clung to the dust motes in the sunlight, giving them a delicate glimmer.
Inside the drawer were letters, so many letters, in the pale blue fountain-pen ink of her grandmother. Sepia photographs - fainter even than the most vintage filter being applied to the fresh tarts three floors below - sat on top of a leather-bound notebook that cracked in defence of its secrets. Margaret McClelland, read the facing page.
The notes and thoughts of Margaret - still young then — filled the room. “The water of life flows in subtle pecan and cocoa…” read one. “A whisper of autumn leaves drifts through every sip, though no tree bends near the cask,” a second. Then, a photograph that seemed to glow red-hot with meaning. Autumn in Bladnoch, 1901, it read.
Liz froze. Three generations before her, this farming family had started the distillery outside Wigtown. These were the ones who had left it all behind when it shuttered in 1905 and was sold. Too little, too late.
Margaret had left her husband once he had been declared bankrupt, destined forevermore to be spoken of only in lowered tones as the “wicked grandfather.” His poor wife had risked so much just by walking away. Walking to Liverpool to raise three children, including Liz’s mother. No riches left, no bitterness or forgiveness either. Just a quiet persistence to do what needed to be done.
Liz turned the pages of the notebook. More photos of men with casks, men with shovels, men with a dog, and one of a woman - surely Margaret herself - beside a cask, by a whitewashed wall. A wall Liz could almost remember, with the roar of a river just out of frame.
Now the attic seemed to exhale with that roar. Liz could almost taste the freshet, smell the wet grass and fermenting grain. The photo brought more pieces to fill the gaps between the fragments that had made it through the years: the bankruptcy, the exile, the tone of vague familial shame.
She was struck by a visceral sense of connection to relatives gone long before. Below, the bakery door opened; vloggers crunched into vanilla-laced pastries and pulled faces of exaggerated delight, the mundane modernity of their disposable content clashing with the sepia-toned significance of Liz’s find. A link to a simpler time, perhaps? Certainly a different place, A simpler life? Or a struggle for her grandmother - a story she had never heard in full.
Liz sipped her coffee while reading other entries. The attic continued to fill with the aroma of baking spice, cocoa powder, and a subtle herbal note – was it mint or sage? A mild-leaf tea being brewed three stories below or three generations of stories ago. She took a deep breath of the familiar vanilla, pecan, and cocoa; and then from somewhere forgotten, the faint earthiness of autumn leaf mulch, lightly roasted hazelnuts, and a flash of green-apple acidity.
She rested her fingers on the leather-bound notebook, tracing Margaret’s pen strokes and remembered the river at Bladnoch, the water coursing past just feet from the casks, the wood absorbing and releasing character in equal measure. She thought of Margaret standing beside that wall, the long shadow of the men and their sheepdog etched in film. She opened the notebook again, drawn back to a line she felt she had read a hundred times this morning: “The water of life flows in pecan and cocoa…”
Loch Maberry: Stories of Bladnoch, Chapter Two has notes of rose, vanilla, pecan, cocoa powder, mint, cinnamon, and autumn leaf mulch. It was selected by Elizabeth Cobbett, the great-great-granddaughter of one of Bladnoch’s original founders.
After her parents passed away, Liz uncovered photographs in their attic and learnt that her grandmother, Margaret Tyrer (née McClelland), had been born in 1882 near the distillery, where the McClelland family earned their living, before moving to Liverpool when it was sold in the early 1900s. Beyond that, this story is entirely fictitious, and any similarity to actual persons or events is unintentional.
Glenfiction reimagines tasting notes as atmospheric short fiction. Stay for one more…