Sister Emily's Lightship (28 page)

After that, fishing meant nothing to him. He wanted to be an artisan. He did not know enough to call it art.

When he got to Edinburgh, a bustle of a place and bigger than twenty Crails laid end to end to end, Simon looked up that same silversmith and begged to become the man's apprentice.

The man would have said no. He had apprentices enough as it was. But some luck was with Simon, for the next day when Simon came around to ask again, two of the lowest apprentices were down with a pox of some kind and had to be sent away. And Simon—who'd been sick with that same pox in his childhood and never again—got to fetch and carry for months on end until by the very virtue of his hard working, the smith offered him a place.

And that is how young Simon Morrison the fisherlad became not-so-young Simon Morrison the silversmith. He was well beyond thirty and not married. He worked so hard, he never had an eye for love, or so it was said by the other lads.

He only had an eye for art.

Now in the great course of things, these two should never have met. Time itself was against them—that greatest divide—a hundred years to be exact.

Besides, Simon would never have gone to America. America was a land of cutthroats and brigands. He did not waste his heart thinking on it, though—in fact—he never wasted his heart on anything but his work.

And though Andrea had once dreamed of Katmandu and Nepal, she had never fancied Scotland with its “dudes in skirts,” as her friend Heidi called them.

But love, though it may take many a circuitous route, somehow manages to get from one end of the map to another.

Always.

Because of the adder rings—a great hit with the Neiman Marcus buyers—Andrea was sent to Scotland by Vogue magazine to pose before a ruin of a fourteenth century castle. The castle, called Dunottar, commanded a spit of land some two and a half hours drive along the coast from Edinburgh and had at one point been the hiding place for the Scottish crown jewels.

Windy and raw weather did not stop the Dunottar shoot; in fact it so speeded things up, the shoot finished early on a Thursday morning. Andrea then had three and a half days to explore the grey stone city of Edinburgh.

She loved the twisty streets and closes, with names like Cowgate and Grassmarket and Lady Wynd, and the antique jewelry shop on a little lane called Thistle.

Edinburgh seemed to be a city of rain and rainbows. A single rainbow over the Greek revival temple on the hill, and a double over the great grey castle.

“If there is such a thing as magic…” Andrea found herself whispering aloud, “it's here in this city.” For the first time she actually found herself believing in the possibility.

The first two days in Edinburgh went quickly, but she soon tired of tourists who spoke every language except English. She knew she needed some quiet, far away from the Royal Mile and its aggressively Celtic shoppes, and far from the Americanization of Princes Street, the main shopping road, where a Macdonalds (without the arches) sat right next to British franchises.

It was then that she discovered a hidden walk that wound around and under the city.

Leith Walk.

Leith had been the old port on the Firth and once a city in its own right, but was now a bustling part of Edinburgh. The old port area after years of decay was now being tarted up, and modernized flats with large
To Let
signs dotted the streets. At first Andrea kept misreading the signs, wondering why toilets were advertised everywhere. Then giggling over her mistake, she went aboard a floating ship restaurant for a quiet lunch alone.

She didn't mean to listen in, but she overheard an elderly English couple near her talking about Leith Walk, which sounded wonderfully off the beaten tourist path.

“Excuse me,” she said, leaning over, “I couldn't help hearing you mention Leith Walk. It's not in my book.” She pointed to the green Michelin Guide by her plate.

They told her how to find the walk which, they said, snaked under and over parts of Edinburgh along the Leith River.

“Though the locals call it the ‘Water of Leith,'” the woman said. “And as you go along, you will often feel as if you had stumbled on to a lost path into faerie.”

Andrea was struck by how earnestly she spoke.

“The Walk looks as if it ends up in Dean Village,” the English woman added.

“An old grain milling center, that,” interrupted her companion. “End of Bell's Brae. Off Queensferry. Solid bridge. Pretty, too.” His bristly ginger moustache seemed to strain his words for they came out crisp and unadorned.

“But do not be fooled, my dear,” the woman continued. “It becomes a mere trickle of a path. But it does go on.”

“The path…” Andrea mused, remembering her Tolkein, “goes ever on…”

The English couple laughed and the man said something in a strange tongue.

“I beg your pardon,” Andrea said. “I don't speak…” She wasn't in fact sure what language he had used.

“I beg
your
pardon,” the man said. “Certain you'd know Elvish.” His eyes twinkled at her and he no longer seemed so starchy. “I simply wished you a good journey and a safe return.”

“Thank you,” Andrea said.

She smiled at them as they stood, and went out, without—Andrea noticed—leaving any kind of a tip.

Simon was not much of a drinker, certainly not as Scots go. He rarely went out with the lads.

He was a walker, though.

Hill walking when he could get out of the city bustle on holiday.

Town walking when he could not.

He always took his lunch with him and during a work day, he would spend that precious time walking, eating as he went.

Fond of hiking up Calton Hill or Arthur's Seat—both of them affording panoramic views of the city—Simon also liked strolling to the Royal Botanic Garden. There he'd dine amidst the great patches of carefully designed flower beds or, in winter, in the Tropical Palm House, enjoying the moist heat.

Occasionally he would take a sketch book and set off along the winding Water of Leith walk in the direction of St. Bernard's Well. He passed few people there, unlike his walks up Calton Hill or Arthur's Seat. And he enjoyed the solitude.

The little drawings he did as he sat by the river found their way into his silverwork—intricate twists of foliage, the splay of water over stone, the feathering on the wings of ravens and rooks.

He had begun such drawings as an apprentice, and continued them—with his master's approval—as a journeyman. He perfected them when he became a master silversmith himself.

In time he became famous for them.

In time.

So you think you see the arc of the plot now. They will meet—Simon and Andrea—along the Leith Walk.

They will fall in love.

Marry.

And…

But you have forgotten that when Andrea takes her first steps along the Leith Walk, heading away from the old port towards Dean's Village and beyond, Simon is already dead some one hundred years earlier. There's not a bit of flesh on those old bones now.

It does present certain intractable problems.

For logic, yes.

Not for love.

It was a lovely early spring afternoon and Simon was grateful to have a half day off. Having had an ugly argument with another of the journeymen over the amount of silver needed for a casting, he wanted some time to walk off his anger.

His anger was with himself more than anyone else, for the other journeyman had been right after all. Simon was not used to making such mistakes.

He was not used to making
any
mistakes.

The master valued Simon too much to argue over half a day. Besides, he knew that with Simon, nothing was ever really lost.

“Go on out, lad,” he said. Though Simon was scarcely a lad anymore, the master still thought of him that way. “Walk about and think up some more of yer lovely designs.”

Simon decided on following the Leith path, and he walked with a brisk stride that dis-invited even a nod from the few people he met along the way.

But by the time he got to St. Bernard's Well—that strange stone neo-Classical folly built by the Waterworks over an actual well whose waters were quite the vogue amongst the New Town gentry—the majority of his anger had passed and he sat down for a bit to sketch, his back against the stone wall.

There was a patch of uncurling ferns near his feet and he loved the sight of the little plants as they unbent their necks. He got the patch down in seven quick lines and then, with three more lines, one fern became a horse's head.

Simon laughed at the conceit. Rather more fanciful than his usual work, but perhaps—he thought—perhaps it was time for
him
to uncurl as well. He was thirty-six years old and half his life gone by. What had happened to the dream that the boy who walked from Crail to Edinburgh had had?

He realized how dreadfully misplaced his anger had been that morning.

As he was thus musing, out of the clear slate of sky there came a crack of thunder.

“By God,” Simon cried, and stood up quickly, preparing to run to the sanctuary of the folly. He was a son of fisherfolk, after all, and not about to believe the innocence of that blue sky.

As he turned…

Andrea's walk along the Leith River had started quietly enough in bright sunshine. But the weather report on the television that morning had promised scattered sunshine and occasional rain.

“Or was it scattered rain and occasional sunshine?” she murmured. Each of her days in Scotland so far had begun with that same promise from the weather man. Each of those promises had been exactly fulfilled, Scottish weather being charmingly predictable.

The scattering began with a bit of spitting, not enough rain to be worried about only enough to be annoying.

Andrea had no idea where the next exit from the Leith Walk might be, and there was no way she was going to climb over the fence, go through that little woods, and then scale the stone wall she could almost make out, just to get away from a spatter. She'd been a mountain hiker too long to worry about such things.

Besides, she thought—jamming her pretty blue Scottish tam on her head and tucking her hair under it—in her khaki pants and Aran sweater she was more than ready for a wee bit of rain. In fact she positively welcomed it.

But the little rain suddenly turned into a downpour.

Luckily that was when she spotted the stone temple ahead. Racing for it, she got in the lee of the wall before the major flood opened up overhead.

Mounting the steps two at a time, she thought she was safe when—without warning—a bolt of lightning struck a little spire on the top of the temple's roof, traveled down a wire, and leaped over to the metal ornament on her tam.

She did not so much feel the shock as smell it, a kind of sharpness in the nose and on the tongue. Her skin prickled, the little hairs rising up on her arms. Then she sank into unconsciousness, falling over the side of the wall and onto the slippery grass below.

A bolt from the blue, you are thinking.

How corny.

The sky
was
actually blue at the moment, except for patches of clouds scudding backwards, in an effort to escape time.

Andrea's eyelids fluttered open.

She sighed.

The first thing she saw was the face of a very concerned youngish man staring down at her.

The second thing she saw was that his eyes were the same bleached blue as the sky over them.

Then she noticed the ginger eyebrows and the cheekbones sharp enough to cut cheese with.

“Am I dead?” Andrea whispered. “Are you an angel?”

Corny yes.

But most lives are as filled with corn as a Kansas field.

Or—if you prefer—a cornfield in east Fife.

Different kinds of corn, of course.

Different kinds of lives.

One minute Simon had been sitting quietly drawing. The next minute he heard the crack of thunder and after that a body came hurtling over the side of the stone wall and sprawled face up at his feet.

For a moment Simon thought it was a boy. The tarn and the pants confused him. But once he'd looked carefully—at the face with its lambent skin, at the long black curls spilling out of the tam, at the soft swell of breast beneath the woolen jumper—he knew it was no boy.

Then the fallen girl's eyes opened. They were almost purple, enormous, lovely.

“Am I dead?” she asked. “Are you an angel?”

“Och, lass, I'm a silversmith. And how could ye have died from that wee jump?” he asked.

“I mean from the lightning,” she said.

He glanced up, worried. After all—there
had
been thunder. But the grey clouds had sped away.

Glancing down, he said, “No lightning, lass. I think ye swooned and fell over the wall.”

“I'm not the swooning type,” she said.

“Then what type are ye?”

He meant nothing bad by the question, but she looked confused. Then she tried to sit up and seemed to be having difficulty doing it. So Simon put a hand to her back to help her up. And though he'd never put an arm around a woman before without being related to her, this seemed so natural that he did not give it another thought.

However, it was then that he realized she was not the
young
lass he'd taken her for. There were a few strands of silver in her hair, tangling through the curls. He imagined taking that silver and weaving it into a pattern on a bracelet.

As his master knew, nothing with Simon was ever lost.

She saw his sketches, she pulled a small notebook from a back pocket of her trousers and showed him hers. They spoke of silver and gold and the intricacies of cloisonné. They talked of working with electrum and foil and plating. They compared the virtues of enameling and embossing.

They did not speak of love.