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Three small headstones stand in an orderly row in the churchyard, names written neatly in the cold stone, a boy and a girl and another boy, their tiny bodies laid to rest, dead before their first sunrise. She remembers each of them, the hope she felt for them, the excitement, the pain, the grief. But it is to another grave she goes most often to remember.
There is a hill, green, sun dappled, unmarked by any stone. There is no sign here of the tiny infant buried in the dead of night in secret under the bright grass, a fourth child, a boy without so much as a name to himself.
She climbs up to this hill often and thinks of him, the other Duncan, the child she replaced. She could not mourn him, this child she carried nine months in her body, this child she loved before she ever saw his face. She could not mourn him, could not give him proper burial, could not set his name in stone to be remembered. So she comes here to remember him, and his brothers and sister who came before him, these children she lost, this child who could have stood in the place of the son she has. She wonders what he would have grown up to look like, if he would have had his father’s eyes, or hair like hers. She wonders if he would have made a wise and strong leader one day. But then she wipes the tears from her eyes and walks down the hill and home to her living son, leaving the dead behind her in their graves.