Short Story: The Inheritance - Part one

Apparently no-one really knew where she came from. The folk on our island at that time were an insular bunch and didn’t take too kindly to strangers, so it must have been hard for her – until she married my grandfather and he draped respectability around her shoulders like a cloak.
They said that she just appeared one night, out of the storm, one of the many Northeasters that dog our coastline. She was dragging a mongrel cur behind her. After she married my grandfather, the mongrel cur was delicately referred to as ‘a mixed breed’ and later still as ‘ a sweet little thing’. My grandfather’s family were elders in the community then.
Naturally I only knew her much later, but she always seemed to me to be different, my grandmother. Viewed through my young eyes, she didn’t seem to fit in at all. With the benefit of maturity, any number of adjectives would have described her, but as a child, I just knew she was different.
I could see my father was embarrassed by her at times. Like most men he wanted to conform - be one of the crowd but she didn’t understand this large awkward son of hers and would laugh and tease him and all; the laughter throbbing in her throat like a gurgling brook. My mother’s sister used to snigger behind her back at family gatherings, making snide remarks about Indian reservations and witch doctors. “She’s away with the fairies,” she used to say, but my mother tried to be kind and replied “No, she’s just a little fey.”
Of course my grandfather was captivated by her very difference. To him she was exotic - a symbol of an outside world after which he yearned but was never destined to explore. He would hear no word said against her, even when the rumors started to gather in the darkness.