Sophia's Secret (25 page)

‘I just wondered.’ To soothe his pricked ego, I asked, ‘What about yourself? Ever been married?’

Back on his own favourite subject, he shook his head. ‘No, not yet.’ And unable to pass up the chance for a play, he said, catching my gaze with his own, ‘I’ve been waiting to find the right woman.’

I didn’t swing at that pitch either. ‘How was London?’

‘Murder. It’s a busy time for us. I’ll be off again tomorrow night, to Amsterdam, and then from there to Italy.’

In scheduling at least he seemed to match my novel’s Captain Gordon, turning up just long enough to have an impact on the plot before he dashed away.

He started telling me about what he’d been up to in London, but I was only half-listening, trying to hold back a yawn that brought blood drumming loudly inside my ears. Stuart, not noticing, carried on talking, and although I tried from politeness to follow along, I was fading, and fast, as my long night of no sleep caught up with me. Resting my head on the chair back, I nodded at something that Stuart was saying.

And that was the last thing I really remembered.

The next thing I knew I was waking up, still in my chair, and the armchair that faced me was empty. The daylight had faded to dusk. As I moved, I discovered that Stuart was more of a gentleman than he would likely have cared to admit – he had taken a spare blanket out of the cupboard and covered me with it, to make me more comfortable. And when I made my way into the kitchen and opened the fridge, I discovered my half eaten fish and chips still on the plate, sealed with cling film, and waiting for me to reheat them for supper.

However irritated I had been with Stuart yesterday, there simply was no way that I could go on being mad at him when he did things like this. Nor could I muster more than faint exasperation when, a little later, Dr Weir phoned up and started off with, ‘I ran into Stuie Keith coming out of the Killie, and he said he’d left you fast asleep, and so I thought I’d best call first.’

Trust Stuart, I thought, to put his own twist on what had happened. But I was glad to finally hear the doctor’s voice.

‘I’ve been away a few days,’ he said, ‘visiting my brother, but I’ve done a bit of reading on the subject of genetic memory and I’ve found a few things that might interest you. I could come round right now, if that’s all right?’

It was more than all right. I’d been waiting to talk to him, wanting to hear his opinion on what I’d discovered in Edinburgh. There wasn’t anybody else I
could
talk to about it, really – no one else who’d listen in the patient, non-judgemental manner of a trained physician and be able to discuss things from the medical perspective.

I had the tea brewed by the time he arrived with a folder of what looked like photocopied pages from assorted books. And before he could tell me what
he’d
found, I told him my news about Mr Hall’s letter describing how he’d brought Sophia to Slains.

Dr Weir was delighted. ‘That’s wonderful. Wonderful, lass. I’d have never believed you could find such a thing. And it actually said that she came from the west, and that both of her parents had died in connection with Darien?’

‘Yes.’

‘How incredible.’ Shaking his head, he said, ‘Well, there you are. There’s your proof that you’re not going mad.’ He smiled. ‘You simply have the memory of your ancestor.’

I knew, deep down, that he was right. I even shared his obvious excitement at my find, but it was tempered by a sense of hesitation. I wasn’t sure I wanted such a gift, or knew the way to deal with all its implications. And my mind was still resisting the idea. ‘How could something like that happen?’

‘Well, it has to be genetic. Do you know much about DNA?’

‘Just what I see on crime shows.’

‘Ah.’ He settled in, balancing his folder for the moment on the broad arm of his chair. ‘Let’s start with the gene, which is the basic unit of inheritance. A gene is nothing but a length of DNA, and we’ve thousands of genes in our bodies. Half of our genes we inherit,’ he said, ‘from our mother, and half from our father. The mix is unique. It determines a whole range of characteristics: your eye colour, hair colour, whether you’re left-or right-handed.’ He paused. ‘Countless things, even your chance of developing certain diseases, are passed down to you in your genes from your parents, who got their own genes from
their
parents and so on. Your nose may be the same shape as your great-great-great-great grandmother’s. And if a nose can be inherited,’ he said, ‘who knows what else might be?’

‘But surely noses aren’t the same as memories.’

He shrugged. ‘It’s been discovered, so I’ve learnt, that there’s a gene that plays a part in making people thrill-seekers, or not. My eldest daughter, now, she always loved a bit of danger, from the time that she was born. Always climbing, she was – we had to harness her to keep her in the pram. She climbed out of her cot, up the bookcases, everywhere. Now that she’s grown, she climbs mountains, and jumps out of airplanes. Where did she get that from? I don’t know. Not her environment,’ he told me, with a certain smile. ‘My wife and I are hardly what you’d call the mountaineering type.’

I shared the smile, imagining the gnome-like doctor or his wife suspended from a cliff by ropes.

‘My point,’ he said, ‘is that some aspects of our nature, of our temperament, are clearly carried in our genes. And memory, surely, is no more intangible than temperament.’

‘I guess you’re right.’

He reached to open up his folder and began to sort the photocopied pages. ‘I did find some very interesting articles on the subject. For instance, here’s a piece by an American professor who believes that the abilities of some savants – autistic savants, who are mentally and socially shut off from all the rest of us, and yet have these strange, unexplainable gifts in one area, music, or maths, for example – this professor thinks their abilities may be the product of some form of genetic memory. He actually uses the term.

‘And here’s another piece that caught my fancy. I tried to keep strictly to science, but even though this is a bit more new-age, it did raise what I thought were some valid possibilities. It suggests that the entire past-life phenomenon, where people are “regressed” under hypnosis and recall what they believe are former lives in other bodies, may in fact be nothing more than their remembering the lives of their own ancestors.’ He handed me the folder, sitting back again to watch me while I sifted through the articles myself. Then he said, ‘Maybe I should start my own wee study, hmm?’

‘With me as your subject, you mean?’ I was briefly amused by the thought. ‘I’m not sure how much use I’d be to science.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Well, there’d be no way to prove just how much of the story was coming from memory, and how much was my own creation,’ I said, thinking now of how I had deliberately brought Captain Gordon back into the plot to stir the waters.
That
had come from my frustration with Stuart and Graham, and not from Sophia. ‘The family history details, fair enough, those can be checked, but when it comes to things like dialogue…’

‘I should imagine it would be a mixture of your memory, and your writer’s art. And what of that? We tinker with our memories all the time. We add embellishments – that fish we caught gets larger, or the faults we had get fewer. But the basic event…well, that is what it is. We can’t turn sad memories to happy ones, no matter how we try. So I’d wager what you’ll write about Sophia, at its essence, will be truth.’

I thought about that later, when he’d gone and I was sitting at my writing table, staring at the screen of my computer while the cursor blinked expectantly.

I wasn’t in the trance, tonight. My conscious mind was uppermost, and I could feel it pushing at my characters while they dug in their heels. They wouldn’t walk the path I tried to put them on. I’d meant to write the dinner scene, with Captain Gordon sitting at the table with John Moray and Sophia, so the two men could continue their competitive exchange.

But neither man was keen to speak, and in the end I had to go and fetch
The Old Scots Navy
book that Dr Weir had loaned me, thinking I might come across some interesting naval going-on that Captain Gordon could be telling everyone about, to get the conversation going.

I hadn’t had the nerve to read the book since that first night when I had opened it and learnt that all the details I had written about Captain Gordon had in fact been real, and not of my creation. That knowledge had been too much for my troubled mind to process at the time, and after that I’d left the book untouched beside my bed.

But desperation drove me now to scan the index, searching for a Captain Gordon reference that might give me what I needed. And I found a document appended to the text, that seemed to be of the right date. It started:

I could feel the now familiar creeping chill between my shoulder blades.

It was all there, as plain as day.

The captain promising the earl that he’d stay off the coast for fifteen days, and the exchange of signals to be used in case he met the French ship, and the fact that Captain Hamilton was bound to grow suspicious if the French ship stayed too long in Scottish waters. Even Captain Gordon’s statement that he might soon have to leave the naval service, since he would not take the oath against King James.

I read it with the same sense of surrealism I’d felt when I’d been sitting in that reading room in Edinburgh with Mr Hall’s old letter. Because I knew for certain I had never read
this
document before. I hadn’t gotten this far in the book on my first reading. I had gotten spooked and closed it, as I closed it now. I pushed it far away from me across the table.

‘Damn.’

I’d honestly believed that scene had been my own invention, that I’d made the captain come back just to complicate the plot. I’d been so proud of how I’d worked the whole thing in. And now I found I hadn’t done such an amazing thing.

It looked as though I’d have to face the fact that Dr Weir had hit the nail more squarely on the head than I’d have liked. It might be that I was not to have a hand at all in the creation of this story.

Maybe all that I
could
do was write the truth.

Deleting the few stilted lines I’d written so the cursor sat once more at the beginning of the chapter, I closed my eyes and felt the silence of the room press round me like a thing alive.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘What scene
should
I be writing?’

The countess looked round, smiling, as Sophia passed the doorway of her private rooms. ‘My dear, would you have seen Monsieur de Ligondez?’

She meant the captain of the French ship, the
Heroine
, which that morning had, unheralded, returned from Norway, sliding down the coast so very stealthily that none at Slains had noticed it until the boat that bore the captain had been rowed halfway to shore. The earl, who had not risen from his bed yet, had been forced to beg Monsieur de Ligondez’s indulgence for the short while it would take to dress and drink his morning draught and make himself prepared.

The countess, also, had just finished dressing.

But Sophia had herself been up some time, and knew exactly where the French ship’s captain was. ‘I do believe,’ she said, ‘that he is walking now with Mr Moray, in the garden.’

‘Then would you be good enough to go and seek him there, and tell him that my son and I are ready now to welcome him.’

Sophia hesitated. She had not been in the garden these three days since Billy Wick had put his hands on her, and she had no desire to go there now in case he tried it once again. But she could not refuse the countess. With a brave lift of her chin, she answered, ‘Yes, of course,’ and did as she’d been asked.

It was another fair spring morning. Songbirds greeted her with twittering more cheerful than the crying of the gulls that wheeled, high specks of white, above the cliffs beyond the garden wall. Her shoulder brushed a vine that loosed a fragrance sweetly unfamiliar from its soft, unfolding leaves, and when she walked her gown brushed lightly over bluebells growing close against the ground.

She did not give herself to daydreams this time, though, but kept her eyes fixed open, and her ears alert. Not far off, she could hear the quiet voices of Monsieur de Ligondez and Moray, though she could not understand their words, and so presumed they must be speaking in the language of the French. She turned her steps towards the sound, and felt so near her goal that she had almost let her guard down when the heavy steps fell in behind her on the path.

She would not show him fear again, she thought. Not looking round, she kept her shoulders square and walked more briskly, heading for the voices with such single-minded focus that she burst upon the speakers like a pheasant flushed by dogs out of the underbrush.

The French ship’s captain stopped mid-sentence, startled. Moray turned to look first at Sophia, then beyond her to the gardener, who had changed his course unhurriedly away from them, towards the malthouse.

Quickly, to distract his narrowed gaze, Sophia said, ‘The countess sent me here to find you.’

Moray’s grey eyes settled once more on Sophia’s face. ‘Did she, now?’  

‘She would inform Monsieur de Ligondez that she is ready, with the Earl of Erroll, to receive him.’  

Moray translated her message for the Frenchman, who bowed low and left them.

Moray made no move to follow. Squinting upwards at the sky, he said, ‘The day is wondrous fair.’

She could do nothing but agree with him. ‘It is.’

‘Have ye yet breakfasted?’

‘I have, sir, yes.’

‘Then come,’ he said, ‘and walk with me.’

It was no invitation, she decided, but a challenge. He did not make a formal offer of his arm, but shifted, with his hand firm on his sword hilt, so his elbow lifted slightly from his body.