The Man of Sorrows

Abstract

Not all of Frazer’s family had been stay-at-homes. In the 1870s, during the university vacations, he and his sister Christine would ramble southwards to the estate of Lafine in Ayrshire, where, in Miss Havisham-like seclusion, lived an unmarried relative of their mother’s. Lafine was a gaunt house in plain stone standing amid 6,000 acres at the head of its own lake. It had descended through their mother’s family for generations. The current occupant, a Miss Martha Brown, was a woman of commanding but far from inflexible disposition who had recently lost a brother. From 1873 until her death in 1897 she and James corresponded regularly, and, from hints dropped in these letters together with much that his mother had already told him, the young man was able to piece together the worldwide exploits of his grandmother’s people, the Bogies. Two pieces in this jigsaw puzzle were provided by family heirlooms. One was a ‘box of eighteenth-century manuscripts which had reputedly been in the possession of James’s great-great-uncle, George Bogle. The other was a necklace of unique and exotic design.¹