The Winter Sea

by Susanna Kearsley

He simply gave a nod and said, ‘Oh, aye,’ which meant he either was acknowledging her comment or agreeing with it. Guessing Rory’s mind was never easy. He took an oatcake from a nearby plate and ate it, and when Mrs Grant prepared to scold him for it, he answered it was likely all the food he’d have that afternoon. ‘I’m away within the hour with her ladyship. We ride to Dunottar.’

  Another clifftop castle to the south of Aberdeen—the home, so Kirsty told Sophia now, of the countess’s nephew by marriage, the Earl Marischal. It was not uncommon for there to be visits between Slains and Dunottar, but not within an hour’s notice. Kirsty frowned. ‘Would there be trouble, then?’

  ‘I dinna ken.’ Rory shrugged. ‘Her ladyship telt me to get the horses ready and prepare to ride with her, and that much I can do.’

  ‘And you, Kirsty,’ said Mrs Grant, ‘should nae worry aboot what the countess does, or why. Things happen in this house that none of us need question.’

  Kirsty bore the reprimand in silence, but she pulled a face when Mrs Grant had turned her back.

  The cook, not turning, said, ‘And if ye carry on wi that, I may forget I have a mind tae let ye have a holiday the morn.’

  Kirsty stopped, amazed. ‘A holiday?’

  ‘A wee one, aye. I’d need ye back again by supper, but with her ladyship away to Dunottar, and Mistress Paterson the only one about, there widna be sae much tae do I couldna spare ye for the day.’

  The prospect of a day to spend whatever way she wished left Kirsty without speech a moment, something none of them had seen.

  But she knew what she would do with such a gift. ‘I’ll go to my sister.’

  ‘Ye’ll have a long walk,’ Rory said.

  ‘’Tis but an hour up the coast, and I’ve nae seen her since the birth of her last bairn.’ Inspired, she asked Sophia, ‘Will ye come with me? She’ll give us dinner, that I’m sure of. Even Mrs Grant’s fine broth is nae match for my sister’s kail and cakes. And she would be that glad to meet ye.’

  Mrs Grant was not so sure it would be fitting for two girls to walk so far, and on their own.

  ‘Och, we’ll have the castle in our view the whole way,’ Kirsty argued. ‘And her ladyship is highly thought of in these parts, so none will think to harm us when they ken we come from Slains.’

  ‘The countess,’ Mrs Grant said, looking squarely at Sophia, ‘widna like it.’

  To which Kirsty’s pert reply was, ‘Will ye tell her?’

  Mrs Grant considered silently. ‘No,’ she said, and turned back to her cooking. ‘I’ll say naethin. But ye’d do well tae mind that, even here, the devil turns men’s thochts when it amuses him.’

  ‘Is that what ails ye, Rory?’ Kirsty smiled at the groom. His stoic features didn’t change, but his eyes warmed a trifle.

  ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘but I’m long past redemption. Take the dog,’ was his advice on leaving, as he tucked a final oatcake in his jacket. ‘Devil’s thoughts or no, there’s none will lay a hand on ye with Hugo at your heels.’

  Sophia thought it sound advice, and the next morning after breakfast when she started out with Kirsty, she held Hugo, the huge mastiff, by his lead. Hugo’s bed was in the stables, and by day he roamed the castle grounds with Rory, as a child might keep close by his father’s knee. He was a gentle beast, for all he barked at strangers and at any sound he took to be a threat. But when they passed the garden wall where Billy Wick was hoeing over stony earth to make a plot for planting physick herbs, the mastiff curled his lip and laid his ears back, growling low.

  The gardener took no notice. Straightening his back, he leaned upon the hoe and looked them over. ‘Comin tae see me, my quines?’ His hard eyes speculated in a way Sophia found discomforting.

  She knew that Kirsty felt it, too, because the younger girl lied bravely, ‘We’re away to run an errand for her ladyship.’ And without further explanation, she urged Sophia to quicken her pace and the two of them passed by and out of the castle’s great shadow. Ahead lay the broad, grassy sweep of the land curving clean to the edge of the black cliffs, the sea stretching wide to the sunwashed horizon.

  Kirsty paused, in full appreciation. ‘There,’ she said. ‘The day is ours.’

  And though Sophia hadn’t felt at all confined within Slains castle, nor had she been treated any way but with great kindness by the countess, she too found that she was glad, in that one moment, that the countess was away from home, that she and Kirsty might enjoy such freedom.

  There were countless sights to wonder at.

  They passed above a large rock at the sea’s edge that was colored with the stainings of a multitude of seabirds, flapping wings of all varieties, returning to their roosts. The rock, said Kirsty, was called locally ‘Dun Buy’, which meant the yellow rock, and was to many visitors a pleasing curiosity.

  The mastiff found it curious as well, and it was plain from Hugo’s interest and the way he eyed the birds that he would happily have lingered for a closer look, but Kirsty gripped his lead more tightly and persuaded him to move along.

  A little further on, they came to a great circular shaft, like a giant’s well, cut at the edge of the cliff, where the sea had eroded the walls of a mammoth cave till the cave’s roof had collapsed, leaving only a strip of stone bridging the cleft at its entrance, through which the waves sprayed with such force that the water appeared to be boiling below when Sophia dared stand at the edge to look down.

  Kirsty came, too, though she stayed one step back. ‘’Tis the Bullers o’ Buchan,’ she named the strange, open-roofed cavern. ‘We call it “The Pot”. Many times a ship chased on this coast by a privateer makes for the Pot, and slips in here to hide.’

  It would not, thought Sophia, as she watched those waves beating wild on the rocks, have been her choice of where to seek shelter. But surely no privateer would have attempted to follow.

  ‘Come,’ said Kirsty, tugging at Sophia’s cloak. ‘I’ll nae be forgiven if I lose ye into the Pot.’

  So Sophia came away reluctantly, and in a quarter of an hour they had arrived at Kirsty’s sister’s cottage and were seated by the fire, admiring Kirsty’s newest nephew, ten months old, with ready mischief in his eyes and dimpled cheeks to rival those of his two sisters and his elder brother, none of whom was yet six years of age. But Kirsty’s sister seemed to take the challenge of so many children cheerfully. Like Kirsty, she was fair of face and quick to speak and quicker still to smile, and as Sophia had been promised, her kail—the dinner broth—was richer and more flavorful than any she had tasted.

  The children were delighted by the presence of the mastiff, Hugo, and tumbled anyhow about him, fearless of the jaws that could have crushed a man, and he, in turn, lay lordly on the hearthrug and accepted their affections and their play with stoic patience.

  Time passed happily, and when Sophia finally left with Kirsty in mid-afternoon, she counted those few hours well spent. ‘Your sister seems to have a pleasant life,’ she said, and Kirsty answered, ‘Aye, she chose her husband well. He is a good man, with a world nae wider than his farm and family. He disna seek adventure.’

  With an eyebrow raised, Sophia asked, ‘And Rory does?’

  ‘Why would ye think I’d be speaking of Rory?’

  ‘Kirsty, I have eyes.’

  The housemaid blushed. ‘Aye, well, ’twill come to naethin. I wish for bairns, a hearth and home, but Rory dreams of things beyond that. When he sees the open road, he wonders only how far it will carry him. There is nae future in a man like that.’

  ‘My father was a man like that,’ Sophia said. ‘But he craved not the open road. For him, it was the sea. He always marveled at the sea, and how its waves appeared to have no ending, and he longed to follow on with them, and touch a foreign shore.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘No.’ The mastiff dragged a little at his lead, head bent to sniff a clump of grass, and so she slowed her steps to let him. Her cloak dragged heavily behind her, and she lifted it a little from the ground. ‘He died o
n board the ship that would have carried him to Darien. They put his body overboard.’

  The mention of the Darien disaster sobered Kirsty, as it did all Scots. She would have been still younger than Sophia when it happened, but the sad details of Darien were scribed into the memory of the nation that had pinned its hopes of future wealth and independence on those few ships of settlers who had sailed to found a colony intended to control the route of trade through the Americas to India.

  ‘It must have been a hard blow for your mother,’ Kirsty said.

  ‘She never learned of it.’ Long months had passed before the news had found its way to Scotland, with the rumors that the colony itself had failed, and been abandoned. By that time, a second eager wave of colonists had sailed. Sophia’s mother, bright and fair, had been among them. ‘She was fortunate,’ Sophia said, when she’d told this to Kirsty, ‘she did not survive the voyage.’ Those who had survived found only bitter disappointment, for the settlement in truth was left defenseless and deserted, and the land that had been promised to bear riches offered nothing more than pestilence and death.

  And James and Mary Paterson were now but names amid the countless others broken by the dream that had been Darien.

  ‘How could ye bear so great a loss?’ asked Kirsty.

  ‘I was young.’ Sophia did not say that she had borne much more in the unhappy years that followed. Kirsty looked too sad already, and this day was not a day for sadness. ‘And I did hear a minister who preached once that there never was a tragedy except the Lord had some great plan for turning it to good. And here I am,’ she said, ‘so it is true. Had both my parents lived, I never would have come to Slains, and we should not have met.’

  Kirsty, presented with this, answered, ‘Aye, that would have been a tragedy indeed.’ And taking up Sophia’s hand, she swung it while they walked and chattered on about less dismal things.

  They passed the Bullers by this time and did not stop to look, but when they reached Dun Buy, and Hugo tried again to make them pause and let him chase a seabird supper, Kirsty stopped, pointed down the coast and said, ‘There is a ship off Slains.’

  Sophia looked, and saw it, too—the furled sails and the rocking hull that rode upon its anchor, some fair distance from the shore. ‘Is that the Royal William?’

  Kirsty raised one hand to shade her eyes, and slowly shook her head. ‘No. That ship is nae Scottish.’

  Sophia’s hand was tugged more firmly, not by Hugo this time but by Kirsty. ‘Come, we canna tarry here. We must get back.’

  Sophia did not fully understand the urgency, but she could feel it surging through her own self as she ran along the clifftop, keeping breathless pace with Kirsty while the mastiff strained against the lead and pulled her onward ever faster.

  She could see the ship’s hands lowering the jolly boat with several men aboard it, and her run, without her knowing why, became a race to reach the castle first, before the jolly boat’s strong oars could land its men upon the shore.

  Near the garden wall the mastiff tore his lead free of her hand and made a dash towards the stables with a single woof of welcome. Rory stood within the stable doorway, wiping down his horse with hay to dry its sweat-stained flanks. He said, ‘We saw the sails from Dunottar. Her ladyship is in the house already.’

  ‘And the ship?’ asked Kirsty, breathless. ‘Is it—?’

  ‘Aye. Now get inside, afore the twa of ye are missed.’ He said no more, but turned back quickly to his work, and Kirsty tugged Sophia’s hand again and told her, ‘Come,’ and so Sophia hurried with her to the kitchen door, not knowing what awaited her inside, nor why the ship was so important, nor indeed if those men rowing to the shore below the castle, who might even now have landed, carried with them something pleasurable, or something to be feared.

  CHAPTER 8

  I WOKE, STILL IN the armchair, to the hard grey light of morning, and a numbing sense of cold. In the confusion of new consciousness, I looked around and noticed that the lamp I’d left switched on last night was off, as was the little electric fire plugged into the wall at my feet. And then, becoming more awake, I realized what had happened, and a quick look at the black box fastened to the wall above the door confirmed that the meter was no longer spinning. The needles rested in the red. I’d used up all my coins, and now my power had gone off.

  Worse, I had gone to sleep before I’d stoked the stove up for the evening, and the kitchen fire was out, as well. The stove, when I got up to touch it, wasn’t even warm.

  I swore, with feeling, since my mother wasn’t in the room to hear me, and dropping to my knees began to rake the old dead coals and ashes over, hoping there would be enough left in the hod to start a new fire.

  I was still at it when Graham came to fetch me for our walk. I must have looked a sight when I opened the door to him, with my face smudged and my clothes in hopeless wrinkles from my sleeping in them, but he was nice enough not to comment on it, and only the deepening creases at the corners of his eyes as I explained the situation to him showed that he found anything amusing.

  ‘And I can’t get the stove to start again,’ I finished in frustration. ‘And because it’s hooked up to the water heater, that means I have no hot water for washing, and—’

  Graham cut in. ‘You look fine,’ he said, calmingly. ‘Why don’t you go and find something warm to put on over that shirt, and I’ll take care of this out here, all right?’

  I looked at him with gratitude. ‘All right.’

  I did a little more than simply put a sweater on. I scrubbed my face, uncaring of the freezing water, and used a wet comb to bring my hair back into order. When I’d finished, my reflection in the mirror was a bit more recognizable. It wasn’t quite the face I’d hoped to show him when he came, but it was one that I could live with.

  In the kitchen, I found Graham boiling water on the small electric stove. The air already felt a little warmer from the fire he’d started in the Aga, and the lamp that I’d left burning in the front room by my chair was on again. I crossed to switch it off, and, bending, pulled the plug on the electric fire.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘No problem. I take it you haven’t had breakfast? You’ll need to eat something, before we head out. It’s a fair walk. What is it you drink, tea or coffee?’

  He was reaching in the cupboards with the confidence of somebody who knew where things would be, and I wondered whether he, like Stuart, had ever stayed here on his own. The thought of Stuart having lived here, on and off, had not affected me, but knowing Graham might have once slept in that small back bedroom, in my bed, was something different. I chased the stray thought from my mind, and asked instead, ‘How did you get the meter running?’ People these days, after all, weren’t likely to be going round with pockets full of 50p coins.

  ‘That,’ he told me, smiling, ‘is a trick that Stuie taught me, and I swore I’d never tell. It wouldn’t do to let Dad’s tenants learn the way of it.’ The kettle had boiled, and he took it off, asking again, ‘D’ye take tea, or coffee?’

  ‘Oh. Coffee, please.’

  He took a pan and cooked me eggs, as well, and made me toast, and served it all up with a slab of cheese. ‘To weigh you down,’ he said, ‘so that the wind won’t knock you off the path.’

  I took the plate, and looked towards the windows. ‘It’s not windy.’

  ‘Eat your breakfast.’ Having made a cup of coffee for himself, he poured the rest of the hot water in the frying pan and washed it, while I watched and tried to think of the last time a man had cooked for me and washed my dishes afterwards. I drew a total blank.

  I asked, ‘Where’s Angus? How’s his paw?’

  ‘It’s not so sore, but if he tried to walk the way up to the Bullers, it would be. I left him with my father for the day. He’ll be all right. Dad always stuffs him full of sausages.’ He rinsed the pan and set it on the draining board to dry.

  His mention of the Bullers made me stop dead in the middle of my toast. Oh, damn, I
thought. I hadn’t written down my dream. I’d had that marvelous, long dream last night, with all that perfect action, and I’d gone and let it go to waste, because I hadn’t thought to write it down. It would be lost, now. If I concentrated, maybe I could reconstruct some bits of it, but dialogue just disappeared unless I got it down on paper moments after it had formed.

  I sighed, and told myself to never mind, that these things happened. There was nothing to be done for it. I’d just been too distracted, when I’d woken, by the cold, and the more pressing need to see I didn’t freeze to death in my front room.

  The room had grown much warmer now, but whether that was wholly from the stove or from the fact that Graham Keith was standing a few feet away from me, I didn’t know. He had crossed to examine the plans of Slains castle, spread out on my work table. ‘Where did you get these?’

  ‘From Dr Weir. He loaned them to me.’

  ‘Douglas Weir? How did you meet with him?’

  ‘Your father set it up.’

  ‘Oh, aye.’ His brief smile held a son’s indulgence. ‘Dad does have connections. Give him time, he’ll have you meeting half the village. What did you think of Dr Weir?’

  ‘I liked him. And his wife. They gave me whisky.’ Which, I realized, made it sound as though the two facts were related, so I stumbled on, ‘The doctor told me quite a lot about the history of the castle, and the Earls of Erroll.’

  ‘Aye, there isn’t much he doesn’t ken about the castle.’

  ‘He said the same thing about you,’ I told him, ‘and the Jacobites.’

  ‘Did he, now?’ His eyebrows lifted, interested. ‘What else did he say about me?’

  ‘Only that he thinks that you’re a Jacobite yourself.’

  He didn’t exactly smile at that, but the corners of his eyes did crinkle. ‘Aye, there’s truth in that. Had I been born into another time,’ he said, ‘I might have been.’ He traced a corner of the Slains plan with his fingers, lightly, then he asked, ‘Who else has my dad got you meeting?’

  I told him, as best I could remember, ending with the plumber’s driving tour. ‘Your brother said he’d drive me round instead.’