The Winter Sea (28 page)

She did not understand at first, but coming slowly to awareness of the feathering of lilac petals, moved to shake them off.

He stopped her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘’Tis how I would remember ye.’

They stood there, in the little silent corner of the garden, and Sophia felt the world receding from them as a wave withdraws along the shore, till nothing else remained but her and Moray, with their gazes bound together and his strong hands warm upon her and the words unspoken hanging still between them, for there was no need to speak.

The night had come.

She heard the sound of someone opening a door, and footsteps starting out on gravel, and the hard, unwelcome sound of Colonel Hooke’s voice, calling Moray.

Moray made no move to answer, and she tried again to find a smile to show him, and with borrowed courage, told him, ‘You must go.’

‘Aye.’ He was not fooled, she thought, by her attempt at being brave, yet he seemed touched by it. ‘’Tis only for a while.’

Sophia held her smile steady when it would have wavered. ‘Yes, I know. I will be fine. I’ve grown well used to being on my own.’

‘Ye’ll not be that.’ He spoke so low his words seemed carried by the breeze that brushed her upturned face. ‘Ye told me once,’ he said, ‘I had your heart.’

‘You do.’

‘And ye have mine.’ He folded one hand over hers and held it close against his chest so she could feel its beating strength. ‘It does not travel with me, lass, across the water. Where you are, it will remain. Ye’ll not be on your own.’ His fingers held the tighter to her smaller ones. ‘And I’ll no more be whole again,’ he said, ‘till I return.’

‘Then come back quickly.’ She had not meant for her whispered voice to break upon those words, nor for the sudden tears to spring behind her eyes.

Hooke called again, some distance still behind them, and she tried to step aside to let him go, but Moray had not finished yet with his farewell. His kiss, this time, was rougher, raw with feeling. She could feel the force of his regret, and of his love for her, and when it ended she clung close a moment longer, loathe to leave the circle of his arms.

She’d told herself she would not ask again, she would not burden him, and yet the words came anyway. ‘I would that I could go with you.’

He did not answer, only tightened his embrace.

Sophia’s vision blurred, and though she knew he would not change his mind, she felt compelled to say, ‘You told me once I might yet walk a ship’s deck.’

‘Aye,’ he murmured, warm against her brow, ‘and so ye will. But this,’ he said, ‘is not the ship.’ His kiss, so gentle on her hair, was meant for comfort, but it broke her heart.

Hooke’s steps were coming closer on the gravel.

There was no more time. Sophia, moved by impulse, freed her hands and reached to draw from round her neck the cord that held the small black pebble with the hole in it she’d found upon the beach.

She did not know if there was truly magic in that stone, as Moray’s mother had once told him, to protect the one who wore it from all harm, but if there was, she knew that Moray had more need of it than she did. Without words, she pressed it hard into his open hand, then quickly pushed away from him before her tears betrayed her, and ran soundlessly between the shadows to the kitchen door.

Behind her, she heard Hooke call Moray’s name again, more loudly, and an instant later Moray’s steps fell heavily along the garden path, and in a voice that sounded rougher than his own, he said, ‘I’m here. Is everything then ready?’

What came after that, Sophia did not hear, for she was through the door and running still, past Mrs Grant and Kirsty, and she did not stop till she had reached the solace of her chamber.

From her window, she could see the trail of moonlight on the sea, and rising dark across its silver path the tall masts of the
Heroine
, her sails now being raised to take the wind.

She felt the small, warm hardness of his ring, clenched in her fist so tightly that it bit into her hand and brought her pain, but she was grateful for the hurt. It was a thing that she could blame for all the tears that swam against her vision.

There was nothing to be gained, she knew, by weeping. She had wept the day her father, with one last embrace, had sailed for unknown shores, and she had wept still more the day her mother had gone after him, and weeping had not given them safe passage, nor yet brought them home again. She’d wept that black night that her sister, with the unborn bairn inside her, had been carried off in screams and suffering, and weeping had not left her any less alone.

So she would not weep now.

She knew that Moray had to leave, she understood his reasons. And she had his ring to hold, his unread letter to remind her of his love, and more than these, his promise that he would come back to her.

That should have been enough, she thought. But still the hotness swelled behind her eyes. And when all the frigate’s sails were filled with wind, and set for France, and the dark ship was loosed upon the rolling sea, Sophia blinked again, and one, small traitor of a tear squeezed through the barrier of lashes and tracked slowly down her cheek.

And then another found the path that it had taken. And another.

And she had been right. It did not help. Although she stood a long time at her window, watching steadily until at last the winging sails were swallowed by the stars; and though her tears, the whole time, slid in silence down her face to drop like bitter rain among the lilac petals scattered still upon her gown, it made no difference, in the end.

For he was gone from her, and she was left alone.

C
HAPTER
15

I
’
D NEVER DONE MUCH
gardening. My mother had, when I was young—but being young, I hadn’t paid attention. I’d assumed that, in the winter, there was nothing to be done, but Dr Weir was bent and busy in his shrubberies when I walked over in the afternoon.

‘We’ve not seen you about these past few days,’ he said. ‘Have you been away?’

‘Well, in a sense. I’ve been at Slains,’ I said, ‘three hundred years ago. That’s why I’m here, because a couple of my characters, so far, have mentioned spies.’

‘Oh, aye?’

‘Daniel Defoe, in particular.’

‘Ah.’ He straightened. ‘Well, I might be able to assist you there. Just bear with me a minute while I check the stakes and straps on Elsie’s lilac, after last night’s wind.’

I followed him with interest to the bare-branched shrub, much taller than the others, at the far end of the border, by one window of the bungalow. ‘That’s a lilac?’

‘Aye. I haven’t had much luck with it. It’s meant to be a tree, but it’s a stubborn-minded thing, and it won’t grow.’

The bark felt smooth against my fingers, when I touched it. Leafless, it stood half the height of that which I’d remembered in the garden up at Slains, against the wall where Moray and Sophia had said their farewells. But even so, it touched a chord of sadness in my mind. ‘I’ve never liked the smell of lilacs,’ I confessed. ‘I always wondered why, and now I think I’ve found the answer.’

‘Oh?’ The doctor turned. His eyes, behind the spectacles, showed interest. ‘What is that?’

And so I told him of the scene I had just written.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s very telling. Scent is a powerful trigger for memory.’

‘I know.’ One whiff of pipe tobacco could transport me straight back to my childhood and my grandfather’s small study, where we’d sat and eaten cookies and discussed what I had thought were grown-up things. It had been there that he’d first told me of the small stone with a hole in it, and how it would protect me if I ever chanced to find one.

Dr Weir asked, ‘What becomes of him, the soldier in your book?’

‘I don’t know, yet. He must not have come back, though, because three years after he left Slains, the real Sophia was back in Kirkcudbright,’ I said, ‘marrying my ancestor.’

He shrugged. ‘Well, they were dangerous times. He most likely got killed on the Continent.’

‘You don’t think he could have died in the ’08, do you? In the invasion attempt, somehow?’

‘I don’t think that anyone died in the ’08.’ He gave a faint frown as he tried to remember. ‘I’d have to read over my books, to be sure, but I don’t mind that anyone died.’

‘Oh.’ It would have been a nice romantic feature for my plot, I knew, but never mind.

The doctor straightened from his work, his round face keen. ‘Now, come inside and have a cup of tea, and tell me what you’d like to know about Daniel Defoe.’

Elsie Weir had a decided opinion of the man who had written such classics as
Robinson Crusoe
and
Moll Flanders
. ‘Nasty little weasel of a man,’ she called him.

The doctor took a biscuit from the plate she held out, and said, ‘Elsie.’

‘He was, Douglas. You’ve said yourself.’

‘Aye, well.’ The doctor settled back into his chair and set his biscuit neatly on the saucer of his teacup. The curtains at the end wall of the sitting room were drawn well back this afternoon to let in the sunlight, which fell with a comforting warmth on my shoulders as I chose a biscuit myself, from my seat by the long row of glass-fronted bookcases.

‘Daniel Defoe,’ Dr Weir said, ‘was doing what he thought was right. That’s what motivates most spies.’

Elsie took her seat beside me, unconvinced. ‘He was doing what he thought would save his skin, and line his pockets.’

The doctor’s eyes twinkled briefly, as though his wife’s stubborn dislike of Defoe struck him as something amusing. To me, he said, ‘She won’t even read his books.’

‘No, I won’t,’ Elsie said, firm.

‘Even though the man’s been dead too long,’ her husband pointed out, ‘to profit from the royalties.’ He smiled. ‘Defoe,’ he told me, ‘was a stout supporter of King William, and no friend of the Jacobites. But he made the mistake, near the start of Queen Anne’s reign, of publishing a satirical pamphlet that the queen didn’t care for, and so he was arrested. He was bankrupt as well, at the time, so when the government Minister Robert Harley offered him an alternative to prison and the pillory, he leaped at it. And Harley was, of course, the queen’s chief spymaster.’

I knew the name, from my own reading.

‘Harley,’ Dr Weir went on, ‘was quick to see the benefits of having someone like Defoe to write his propaganda. And being a writer, Defoe was well-placed to do more for the government. Just before the Union, Harley sent him up to Edinburgh, to work in secret for the Union cause and to discredit those opposed to it. Defoe, as his cover, let dab he was writing a book on the Union and needed some help with his research. Not unlike what you yourself are doing, here in Cruden Bay.’

And, like myself, Defoe had found that people, by and large, were happy to sit down and tell a writer what they knew.

‘They didn’t think he was a spy,’ said Dr Weir. ‘But everything they told him found its way to Harley, down in London. And Defoe was good at learning things, observing, and manipulating. There’s no doubt that he had an impact on the Union being passed.’

‘A weasel,’ Elsie said again, and set her teacup down with force.

I asked, ‘Would he have ever been to Slains?’

‘Defoe?’ The doctor frowned. ‘I wouldn’t think so, no. He might have known what they were up to, and he doubtless would have met the Earl of Erroll, who was often down in Edinburgh, but I’ve not heard Defoe came up to Slains. But there were other spies. And not only in Scotland,’ he told me. ‘The English took a great interest in what went on at Saint-Germain. They had a whole network of spies based in Paris, and some at Versailles, with their ears to the ground. And they even sent people right into Saint-Germain, when they could manage it. Young women, usually, who slept with men at court and carried back what news they could.’

‘The tried and trusted method,’ Elsie said, to me, her mood improving now that we’d got off the subject of Daniel Defoe.

Dr Weir was thinking. ‘As for Slains…I’ll have to do a bit of reading, see if I can’t find a spy or two who might have ventured that far north.’

And with that settled, we moved on to talk of other things.

I stayed much longer than I’d meant to. By the time I left them it was dusk. The rooks were gathering again above the Castle Wood, great clouds of black birds wheeling round against the night-blue sky and cawing raucously. I quickened my steps. Up ahead I could see the warm lights of the Kilmarnock Arms spilling out through its windows and onto the sidewalk, and crossing the road I turned briskly down Main Street, my eyes on the dim looming shapes of the dunes rising up on the opposite side of the swift-rushing stream.

It was windy tonight. I could hear, farther off, the great roar of the waves as they rolled in to break on the beach and slip backward, collecting their strength to reshape and roll shoreward again in an endlessly punishing rhythm.

It had a hypnotic effect. When I started to climb the dark path up Ward Hill, my steps were all but automatic and my mind was filled with waking dreams. Not all of them were pleasant. There was something unseen on that path, not chasing me but waiting for me, and as I tried hard to fight the rising sense of panic gripping me, I suddenly stepped forward into nothingness.

It was like stepping off a curb without expecting to. The ground was there, but lower than I’d thought that it would be, and when my foot came down it came down hard into a deep rut underneath the thickly tufted grass, and twisted so I lost my balance and began to slide.

There was no time to think. Pure instinct made me grab at anything to stop myself, and by the time I’d registered the fact that I had left the path and was now slipping dangerously down the steep side of the hill above the sea, my fall was stopped abruptly by a line of leaning temporary fencing that was strong enough at least to hold me while I tried to catch my breath.

From my ankle came a fiercely shooting pain that burned like fire. In full awareness now, I looked up at the spot from which I’d fallen. What a stupid thing to do, I thought. The path would have been plain to see, despite the growing darkness. I had no excuse. Except…

Now that I thought of it, this hadn’t been the first time that my judgment had been off. The only difference was that when I’d come close to stepping off the path before, there had been someone walking at my side to steer me back. Tonight, there hadn’t been. I’d been alone, and lost in thought, and with no guide but my subconscious.

Distracted for a moment from my ankle’s pain, I chanced a look down at the steep fall to the sea below me, and I wondered just what shape the shore had been, in 1708. Could it be possible my own steps were remembering a different path, along a stretch of land that had since fallen to the slow, eroding forces of the wind and sea?

As if replying to that thought, the wind blew colder, and reminded me I’d fallen in that place along the path that always made me feel uneasy. And when I saw the shadowed shape above me of somebody walking past along the path, my first response was not to feel relief, but apprehension.

I was glad to see the shadow stretch and shape itself to something more familiar, if a little unexpected. And I called to it as loudly as I could.

‘Christ!’ said Stuart Keith. He came down the hill like a sure-footed mountain goat, and in an instant was crouching beside me. ‘What’s happened?’

‘I fell,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing much, I’ve only hurt my ankle. But I need a little help.’

He frowned, and felt my ankle. ‘Is it broken, do you think?’

I shook my head. ‘It’s only twisted. Maybe sprained.’

‘Well, you’d best let a doctor decide that.’

‘It isn’t that serious. Honest,’ I said, to his unconvinced face. ‘I’ve broken my ankle before, and I know how that felt, and this doesn’t feel anything like it.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Very sure. If you’ll just help me up,’ I said, holding my hand out.

‘You’re sure you can manage? Because I could carry you.’

‘Great. Then we’d
both
end up over the edge.’ With my jaw set, I said, ‘I can climb, I’ll just need you to help me.’

He did more than help me. He practically hauled me back up the long hillside and onto the path. Then, wrapping an arm round my shoulders, he supported my weight while I hobbled the rest of the way to the cottage.

‘Here we are,’ said Stuart, his own breathing labored from holding me up. He waited for me to unlock the door, then helped me through it and steered me across into one of the armchairs.

‘Thanks,’ I said with feeling. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done, if you hadn’t turned up.’

‘Aye, well—rescuer of damsels in distress, that’s me.’ He flashed a smile more self-aware than Graham’s. ‘Keep that ankle up, now. I’ll get something to put on it.’

All that I had in the small freezer part of my fridge was a bag of mixed vegetables, but that worked fine. And it did make my ankle feel better. I leaned back in my chair and looked at Stuart. ‘When did you get back, anyway?’

‘Just now. I had thought of waiting till morning to look in on you. A good thing I didn’t.’

The telephone rang.

‘No,’ he said, ‘you stay sitting. I’ll get it.’

The phone was a portable one, and I’d hoped he would just bring it over, but no—being Stuart, he answered it first. I was praying it wasn’t my mother, or, worse still, my father, when Stuart said charmingly, ‘No, she’s just resting. Hang on a minute.’ Crossing back, he handed me the phone.

I closed my eyes, prepared for anything. ‘Hello?’

Jane’s voice was dry. ‘Shall I ring back another time?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘I just wondered. You sound…busy.’

‘I—’

‘You don’t need to explain,’ she swept away my explanation. ‘I’m your agent, not your mother.’

Actually, I might have found it easier if it
had
been my mother on the phone, because my mother, while she did have her opinions, didn’t pry, whereas Jane would never let this drop, no matter what she’d said, till she’d had all the details. Still, she’d known me long enough to not come at me all at once, with questions. ‘I won’t keep you long, at any rate. I only called to ask you up for lunch,’ she said, ‘on Saturday.’

I hesitated. Saturdays and Sundays were the days I spent with Graham, and I didn’t like to lose them. But I valued, too, my time with Jane and Alan, and their baby, and surely by Saturday I would be able to walk. ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘I’d love to come.’

‘Good. Will you need me to come fetch you in the car, or do you have a driver now?’

I didn’t take the bait. ‘I’ll let you know.’

‘Local man, is he?’

‘Jane.’

‘Right, I’ll keep out of it. Let you get on with your evening.’ I heard the conspirator’s smile in her voice as she wished me good night and rang off.