The Winter Sea (29 page)

I sighed, and set down the receiver. Stuart didn’t notice. He was standing at the door, beneath the black electric meter, making some adjustment to it. Realizing that I was off the phone, he turned and grinned. ‘Don’t look. You’re nearly out of time on this. I’m fixing it.’

‘Yes, well, your brother’s done that once already, and your father’s bound to figure out, someday, that I’m not paying what I should.’

He didn’t seem concerned about his dad’s suspicions. Something else I’d said had grabbed his interest. ‘Graham’s been here? When was that?’

I’d slipped up, and I knew it. ‘Oh, a while ago,’ I told him. ‘He was helping with my book.’ And then, before Stuart could think to ask anything else, I distracted his attention by leaning to push down my sock for a look at my ankle.

It worked. He said, ‘Christ, look at that.’

It was swollen. The pain, though, now that I’d stopped hobbling around, had dulled itself down to a steady throb, something I found easier to manage.

Stuart frowned. ‘You’re sure you won’t have someone look at that?’

‘I’ll show it to Dr Weir tomorrow,’ I promised. ‘But trust me, it’s only a sprain, if it’s anything. Nothing that rest and some aspirin won’t cure.’

His torn expression, I decided, wasn’t just because I wouldn’t see a doctor. More than likely it owed something to the fact that he’d have headed here to visit me tonight with a seduction scene in mind. But even Stuart, in the end, had too much chivalry to try it on with someone who’d been injured.

He brought me my aspirin and water to take it with, settled me into my chair with the phone at my side, and then smiled with the confidence of a commander who’d lost the day’s battle but fully expected a victory the next time around. ‘Get your rest, then,’ he told me. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

I had every intention of resting. I did. After Stuart had gone, I leaned back in the chair and tried closing my eyes for a moment, but then the wind rose at the windows and rattled the glass and moaned low round the cottage, until the lamenting became a low murmur, like voices, and one voice from among them warned, ‘The moment will be lost.’

So I knew the idea of resting was out. It was difficult, standing and making my shuffling way to the work table, but it would have been even more difficult to sit still when my characters called.

And I knew, at this point in the story, I wasn’t the only one dealing with pain.

XI

K
IRSTY SET THE BOWL
of broth before Sophia. ‘Ye must eat.’

Sophia had not managed anything at breakfast. She’d been grateful that the countess, with the earl her son, had gone to Dunottar, and had not seen her as she’d been this morning, pale and feeling ill.

She knew the reason for it. She had not been sure at first, but now it was August, and nearly three months had passed since her marriage to Moray, and there could be no other cause for this strange sickness that came on each morning and confined her to her bed. It had been so, she well remembered, with her sister Anna, when the bairn had started growing in her belly.

Kirsty knew, as well. Her cool hand smoothed Sophia’s forehead. ‘Ye’ll not be so ill the whole time. It will pass.’

Sophia could not meet the sympathy in Kirsty’s eyes. She turned her head. ‘What will I do?’

‘Cannot ye tell her ladyship?’

‘I promised I would not.’

Drily, Kirsty said, ‘A few months more, and ye may find it difficult to keep that promise.’

‘In a few months more, I may not have to.’ Surely it could not be that much longer till the king would come, and Moray with him, and there would be no need then to hide their marriage.

Kirsty took the sense of that, and nodded. ‘Let us hope that ye are right.’ Again her hand passed cool across Sophia’s forehead, and on inspiration she said, ‘I will ask my sister if she knows of any potions that might help ye through this time.’

Sophia’s hand moved in protection to her still-flat stomach. ‘Potions?’ She remembered Anna’s agony. The evil, grinning woman with her bottles. ‘I cannot take any medicines. I would not harm this bairn.’
His
bairn, she thought—born of his love for her. A part of him, inside her. She drew warmth at least from that.

‘The bairn will not be harmed,’ was Kirsty’s promise. With a smile, she said, ‘My sister’s been through this more times than most, and all her bairns came full of life and yelling to the world. She’ll know what ye should do. She’ll help ye.’

It would not be soon enough, Sophia thought, as yet another wave of sickness caught her helpless in its roll, and made her turn her face, eyes closed, against the pillow.

Kirsty stood. ‘I will send word to her, and see if she will come afore her ladyship returns.’

Before night, Kirsty’s sister came, a calming presence with her understanding eyes and gentle ways. She brought Sophia dried herbs wrapped in cloth, to brew as tea. ‘’Twill ease the sickness greatly so that ye can feel yourself again and take a bit o’ nourishment.’

It helped.

So much so that, next morning, she felt well enough to rise, and dress, and take her place at table. She was still the only person in the house, besides the servants, so there was no one to see the way she smoothed her hand across her stomach with new pride, protectively, before she sat. Her appetite was small but still she ate, and after eating sought a warmly sunlit corner of the library, to pass the morning reading.

She could draw some sense of shared communion, sitting here where Moray had so often sought escape from his forced inactivity at Slains, and feeling in her hands the smooth expensive leather bindings of the books he had so loved to read.

And one book, out of all of them, could draw her to a stronger feeling of connection to him, as though Moray’s voice were speaking out the words. It was a newer volume, plainly bound, of Dryden’s
King Arthur, or the British Worthy.
The pages were so slightly used she doubted whether anyone but Moray and herself had read the lines, and she was only sure that he had read them because in the letter he had left her—in that simple letter, with its sentiments so strong and sure that every night, on reading them, they banished all her worries—he had quoted from this very work of Dryden’s, and the verse, writ in his own bold hand, stayed with her as though he himself had spoken it:

She read it over now, and touched the book’s page with her fingers as though somehow that could bring him close. A few weeks more, she told herself. A few weeks more—a month, perhaps, and then the king would surely come.

The household spoke of nothing else. The visitors still came and went, in states of great excitement, and throughout the summer Slains had seemed as busy as a royal court itself, at times, the dinner table ringed with unknown faces, men who’d traveled miles to carry secret messages from nobles to the north, and from the Highlands.

The nobles dared not come themselves. A gathering of Jacobites would only draw Queen Anne’s attention, and it was widely known the English Court had turned its ever-watchful eye toward the north, as might a hound that had caught some new scent upon the wind. This was no accident, according to the countess, who had made no false attempt to hide her own opinion of who was responsible. She’d counseled all who came to Slains that they should keep their words and actions guarded from the Duke of Hamilton. ‘If he does seek to be a wolf within the fold,’ she’d said, ‘we would do well to let him carry on believing we are sheep.’

The earl had smiled at that, and told her, ‘Mother, you are many things, but no man who has met you could consider you a sheep.’

Sophia privately agreed with him. The countess, who so many times had proved her strength of intellect, had this summer shown a strength of body that Sophia, for her youth, could not have matched. The older woman slept but little, rising early to her work of putting everything in order for the coming of the king—playing hostess to the many guests, and tending to her daunting correspondence. There was not a night, it seemed, but that the light within the chamber of the countess burned long after all the others were extinguished.

And the pace at which she drove herself—a pace which might have left a man exhausted—had apparently done nothing but increase her sense of restlessness.

‘For God’s sake!’ she’d exploded, only last week, when Sophia had been standing with her at the great bow window of the drawing room. ‘What can they all be thinking of ? They must come now. They
must
, or else the moment will be lost.’

And yet the sea beyond the window stayed dishearteningly empty. No new sails on the horizon, bringing word from Saint-Germain.

Sophia had, from habit, stood that morning upon waking at the window of her chamber, with her gaze turned eastward, hopefully, but she’d seen only sunlight on the water, hard and glittering, and after some few minutes that had pained her eyes so that she’d had to look away.

There would be no great news today, she thought, not with the countess and her son still on their visit with the Earl of Marischal at Dunottar. It was a day for rest, and solitary things. Sophia settled with the books, and read, and let the sunlight slanting through the window warm her downturned head, her shoulders, lulling her to drowsiness and then to the oblivion of sleep.

She woke to Kirsty’s gentle shaking of her arm. ‘Sophia, ye must waken.’

Sophia forced her heavy eyes to open. ‘What time is it?’

‘Past noon. Ye have a visitor.’

Sophia struggled upright in her chair, aware of Kirsty’s urgency. ‘Who is it?’

‘’Tis none other than His Grace the Duke of Hamilton, come all the way from Edinburgh by coach.’

At a loss, her mind still turning slowly after sleep, Sophia said, ‘But he’ll have come to see the countess and the earl, not me.’

‘Aye, so he will, and Rory’s riding now to Dunottar to fetch them home. But till they arrive, you’re the only one in the house fit to receive him. Come, I’ll help ye dress.’

She dressed in haste, and glanced with doubt into the looking-glass. Her face still showed the pallor of the sickness she’d just overcome, and even she could see, in her own eyes, that she was nervous.

She had no wish to face the Duke of Hamilton alone.
He knows too much
, so John had told her,
but he knows that he does not know all, and that, I fear, may drive him to new treachery.

The countess, were she here, would be intelligent enough to see through any false advance that he might make. She would not let herself unwittingly be led into revealing any details that might harm the chances of the king, or injure those who served him. She would, in fact, if she were here, be more apt to manipulate the duke, than he would her.

But she was not here, and Sophia knew her own wits must this afternoon be sharper than they’d ever been. There was too much at stake. And not only for the king and those who followed him.

It was not of the king’s life and his future she was thinking as her hands moved lightly down the bodice of her gown, as if to satisfy themselves the tiny life that beat within her was yet safe.

Kirsty, noticing the movement, said, ‘It does not show. Ye need not fear the Duke will see.’

Sophia dropped her hands.

‘But he’ll see
that
,’ said Kirsty, nodding at the heavy silver ring Sophia wore now always round her neck, upon a slender silver chain that could be easily concealed beneath her clothes. The chain had slipped now from the neckline of the gown, and Kirsty pointed out, ‘It would be safer for ye not to wear it.’

She was right, Sophia knew. From Moray’s tales about his childhood she knew well that his own father, who had given him that ring, had shared an intimate acquaintance with the family of the duke, and it was likely that the duke had from a young age seen that ring on Moray’s father’s hand. Sophia could not take the chance that he would see it now and recognize it, for she knew it would not take him long to reason out how she had come to have it in her keeping.

He must never learn that you are mine
, warned Moray in her memory, and she slipped the chain off with reluctance. ‘Here,’ she said to Kirsty, handing her the ring.

‘I’ll guard it well.’

Sophia knew that. But she would have given much to feel the comfort of that ring against her heart to give her courage as she carefully descended to the drawing room to greet the Duke of Hamilton.

‘Your Grace.’ Was that her voice, she wondered, sounding so composed? ‘You do us honor with your visit.’

He looked much the same as she remembered—the elegant clothes, and the curled black wig styled in the full height of fashion to fall past his shoulders. But she fancied the still-handsome features had hardened to something less pleasant in places, a self-serving mask that he wore to a purpose. His eyes, although languid, were watchful and noticing. In but the space of a breath they had taken her measure. The duke gave a bow. Raised her hand to his lips.

‘Mistress Paterson. The honor is all mine, I can assure you.’ His smile, as charming as before, was meant to put her at her ease. ‘I must say, living here at Slains does appear to agree with you. You are more lovely even than I did remember.’

‘You are kind.’ Politely, she reclaimed her hand, and took a seat so he would do the same. She found it easier, to face him sitting down.

‘I’m told the countess and her son are not at home?’ His tone was casual, but underneath Sophia thought she sensed a probing pause that she was meant to fill. She filled it cautiously, her own voice light.

‘They are expected back at any moment.’ Then, to turn the tables, she said, ‘You will stay, I hope, until they do arrive? They would be, I know, most sorry to return and find they’d missed you, and would surely have not ventured from the house if we had known that you were coming.’

There, she thought. Let him explain his visit, and the reason he’d come all this way without first sending word. If what the countess thought was true, he’d likely come to spy on them, and gain his own intelligence on what was being done at Slains in preparation for the king’s arrival. If that was so, Sophia thought, then he must now be thinking himself fortunate to find, in place of the more suspicious countess and the forceful young earl, a mere girl, on her own and—to his mind—a lamb to be easily led.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do regret I am come unannounced, but till today I did not know my business would compel me so far north. I thought only to pay my respects, I’ll not trouble the family by staying. No doubt they’ve had enough guests, lately.’

She saw it for herself, that time—the briefest flash behind his smiling eyes, but still she saw it, and knew she had done right to treat him warily. ‘No guests as gracious as yourself,’ was how she stepped around the trap. And then she asked, as any young and guileless girl might ask, what news there was from Edinburgh, what gossip from the English court, and what the latest changes were in fashion.

Their conversation was a sort of dance, she thought, with complicated steps, but as the time wore on she grew to know the way of it, and when to step, and when to twirl, and when to simply stand and wait.

He led with skill, not asking questions outright but arranging his own statements so that she would follow on with some small bit of information, but she kept her own wits sharp and always countered with a seemingly ingenuous response that gave him nothing in the way of satisfaction.

She felt sure he did not know she was doing it deliberately—the duke was not the sort of man to credit someone like herself with that kind of ability—but still, throughout the afternoon his speech took on a faint edge of frustration, as a man might feel who tries to do a simple task and finds himself confounded.

Yet he did not leave, not even after four o’clock had come and they’d been brought the usual refreshments for that hour of wine and ale, and little cakes in place of bread today because there was a visitor. Sophia had thought, after that, the duke would surely take his leave and carry on his way to where he meant to spend the night, but he did not. He only settled deeper in his chair, and spoke at greater length, with greater charm, to make the dance steps still more intricate.

Sophia matched the effort with her own, but found it tiring. By the time she heard the sound of steps and voices from the entry hall that told her that the countess and her son had finally come, Sophia’s mind was near exhaustion.