The Winter Sea

by Susanna Kearsley

  From here on the beach I could not see the walls of Slains, but I imagined them. I roofed the castle in my mind and gave it life again, and saw a couple strolling far off on the pathways of the garden, and the countess coming down the steps to greet her latest visitors who’d just arrived on horseback, riding hard to bring the hopeful word from France.

  And if I turned my head I saw the phantom of a running sail against the grey horizon, as I’d seen so often in my childhood from a different shore. And now I understood why I had seen it, and why even now I felt the strange pull of the sea that drew me like an outstretched hand and called me back when I had been too long away.

  My father had been right: the sea was in my blood, and had been put there by Sophia’s thoughts, her memories, all that she had sent to travel down through time to me. I felt the bond between us as I sat and watched the sunrise fade to morning light above the sea that seemed now to be casting off its winter face, the long waves rolling in to dance more lightly on the sand.

  I sometimes felt a sadness when I’d reached the ending of a book, and had to bid the characters goodbye. But I could find no sadness in this story’s end, and I knew Jane would find none either, and be pleased with it, as I was. And that sense of pleasure stayed with me as, finally giving in to the demands of my half-frozen body, I got up and slowly walked across the beach and up the path to where my cottage waited on the hill.

  It had looked glad to see me yesterday when I’d arrived back from Kirkcudbright, and I felt the same sense now of welcome when I came in through the door to find the Aga warmly burning and the papers spilling over on the table where I’d spent the long night writing. Though I knew I’d soon be moving down to Aberdeen to Graham’s house—our house, he had corrected me—I’d still arranged with Jimmy for the cottage to be here for us to use when we came down weekends. I’d come to think of it as mine, and while I would have gone with Graham anywhere, just as Sophia went to follow Moray, I felt comfort in the knowledge that I didn’t have to lose my views of Slains and of the sea.

  And Graham seemed to understand my feelings, even though he didn’t know the reason for them, and he maybe never would. I hadn’t yet decided if I’d tell him what had happened to me here, for I felt certain if I did he’d only laugh and kiss my face and call me crazy.

  Bad enough I’d have to tell my father that we might not be McClellands after all, but Morays. It was too early in the morning yet to place a call to Canada, he’d still be fast asleep, but I would have to do it sometime. He would read it in the book when it came out and be suspicious, and although it wasn’t something I could prove I knew him well enough to know that once he’d got his mind around the possibility, he’d do his best to find his own proof. He had always loved a challenge, had my father. He’d be hunting through the records of the Royal Irish Regiment, and tracking down descendants of the male line of the Abercairney Morays to compare their DNA with his.

  I smiled faintly as I filled the kettle for my morning coffee, thinking that if nothing else, my father might uncover some new relatives a little less eccentric than the ones we had— Ross McClelland exempted, of course. I was keeping Ross, no matter what.

  He’d seen me to the station yesterday, and sent me off with homemade fudge that I’d forgotten until now. Remembering, I rummaged in my suitcase, which was sitting where I’d dropped it just inside the door when I’d come in. I found the bag that held the fudge, and as I tugged it out the little auction catalogue that Ross had given me came with it, so I took it, too. I hadn’t had a chance to read it yet, to see what heirlooms our New York McClellands would be selling off this time. Nothing too terrible, obviously, or else my father would have called me to complain about it.

  Waiting while my kettle boiled, I took a bite of fudge and turned the pages of the catalogue. There wasn’t much. A table and a mirror, and two miniature portraits of McClellands from a different family tree branch than our own, and some assorted jewelry: rings, a necklace of pink pearls, a brooch…

  I paused, and felt a chill chase up my spine as though a sudden wind had struck between my shoulder blades and lifted all the hair along my neck. Forgetting both the kettle and the fudge, I moved to lean against the counter for support as I looked closely at the picture of the brooch.

  It was a simple thing—a small but heavy square of silver with a red stone at its centre.

  No, I thought. Not possible. But there it was. Beneath the photograph, a brief description of the item stated that, in the opinion of the jeweler who’d appraised it, this appeared to be an old ring that had been made over as a brooch, most likely in the later Georgian period.

  I traced the outline, plain and square, of Moray’s ring, and thought of all the times that I had seen it in my mind while I’d been writing, all the times I’d almost felt its weight against my own chest, all the times I’d wondered what had happened to it.

  Now I knew.

  She’d kept it, and the years had sent it traveling down through the family until no one could remember where it came from, who had worn it, what it meant. It might have passed out of our family altogether and been sold to strangers, if I had not come to Slains.

  But I had come. The sea, the shore, the castle walls had called to me, and I had come.

  I touched the picture of the brooch with fingers that shook slightly, because Moray’s ring, too, had a voice—a quiet but insistent voice that called to me across a wider sea, and when I heard it there was no doubt left within my mind what I was meant to do.

  Graham was still up and reading when I came to bed. He’d put on one of the small electric heaters to take the chill out of the room, but it was no match for the storm winds blowing strongly off the sea, so strongly that I’d spent the evening worrying the phone lines would go down and I would miss my scheduled call from New York City. But I hadn’t.

  Graham looked up from his book as I came in the room. ‘Did ye get it?’

  But he knew the answer from my smile as I climbed shivering beneath the covers. ‘Yes.’ I didn’t bother saying what I’d paid for it, because it didn’t matter. I had known when I’d arranged to bid by telephone tonight at auction that I wasn’t going to stop until I got the brooch. The ring. And in the end there hadn’t been that many people bidding for it, only two besides myself, and they had lacked my private motivation. To them, it had been nothing more than jewelry, but to me it was a piece of Moray and Sophia that I could hold in my hand, and keep with me for always, to remember them.

  ‘What’s that you’re reading?’ I asked Graham, and he turned the cover round to show me.

  ‘Dryden’s plays. The one that you had marked,’ he said. ‘The Merlin one. Where did you dig this up?’

  ‘Dr Weir loaned it to me.’ I’d been at Dr Weir’s for tea two days ago, and seen the book of Dryden on his shelf—a modern volume, not an old one, but I’d asked about it anyway, and he had known the play I meant.

  ‘Except it was renamed,’ he’d said. ‘Yes, this is what you’re after, here. Merlin, or the British Enchanter.’

  Why Dryden had changed the play’s title from Arthur to Merlin I couldn’t imagine, but it was the same play. I’d read the lines with the warm sense of recognition that I felt when picking up a favorite novel.

  Graham said, ‘I’m nearly at the end. King Arthur’s just been reunited with his Emmeline.’ He quoted smoothly from the page: ‘“At length, at length, I have thee in my Arms; Tho’ our Malevolent Stars have struggled hard, And held us long asunder”. Sounds like us,’ he said, and setting down the book he switched the lamp off, rolling over while I snuggled close against him in the dark.

  It sounded more like someone else, to me. I smiled. ‘We didn’t have any malevolent stars.’

  ‘Well, maybe not, no. Only Stuie.’

  He was drifting, I could hear it in his voice. He always fell asleep as easily as some great lazing cat, he only had to close his eyes and moments later he’d be gone, while my own mind kept on whirring round with scattered thoughts and
images.

  I felt his breathing slow against my neck, the heavy warmth of him behind me like a shield to block the fierceness of the storm that even now seemed bent on shaking its way through the windows of the cottage. I was lying there and thinking when I heard the click. At first I didn’t realize what had happened, till I saw the glow of the electric heater dying. ‘Oh, no. The power’s out. The storm—’

  ‘It’s not the storm,’ said Graham. ‘Just the meter. It was low this afternoon, I meant to fix it for you. Sorry.’

  ‘Well, I’ll fix it now.’

  But Graham held more tightly to me. ‘Let it be,’ he mumbled, low, against my shoulder. ‘We’ll be warm enough.’

  My eyes closed and I started drifting, too. Until I realized what he’d said.

  I was awake again, and staring. ‘Graham?’

  But he was already sleeping deeply, and he didn’t hear.

  It might be just coincidence, I thought, that he had twice now used the same words that I’d written in my book, the words that Moray had once spoken to Sophia. And Moray only looked like him because I’d made him look like him…I had made Moray look like Graham, hadn’t I? It couldn’t be that Moray had in fact had eyes the color of the winter sea, the same as Graham’s eyes, and Graham’s mother’s eyes…

  My mother’s family goes a long way back here, he had told me.

  And an image crossed my own mind of a little girl with darkly curling hair who long ago had run with outstretched arms along the beach. A girl who had grown up here and presumably had married and had children of her own. Had anybody ever traced the line of Graham’s family tree, I wondered? And if I tried to myself, would I find it included a fisherman’s family who’d lived in a cottage just north of the Bullers of Buchan?

  That, too, seemed impossible. Too like a novel itself to be true. But still I saw that little girl at play along the shore. The wind rose swirling at my window with a voice that was familiar and again I heard Sophia saying, as I’d heard her say my first day in this cottage, that her heart was held forever by this place. And I could hear the countess answering, ‘But leave whatever part of it you will with us at Slains, and I will care for it. And by God’s grace I may yet live to see the day it draws you home.’

  As I lay listening to Graham’s steady breathing in the darkness, I could almost feel that tiny missing fragment of Sophia’s heart rejoin my own and make it whole. Behind me, Graham shifted as though he had felt it, too. And then his arm came round me, solid, safe, and drew me firmly back against the shelter of his chest, and I felt peace, and turned my face against the pillow, and I slept.

  THE END

  ABOUT THE CHARACTERS

  Any work of historical fiction relies on real people. With very few exceptions—little Anna, and the servants at Slains, and Sophia—the characters from the eighteenth-century story are real, and their actions are bound by the limits of what truly happened.

  Not that finding out what truly happened in the ’08 is an easy thing. All sides, for their own purposes, tried hard to cover up the truth, and even what was written by the people who lived through it can’t be trusted. I’m indebted to John S Gibson’s masterfully succinct history of events surrounding the invasion, Playing the Scottish Card: The Franco-Jacobite Invasion of 1708, the book that first inspired me to write about the period, and to Colonel Nathaniel Hooke’s wonderfully detailed memoir of the incident, published in 1760 as The Secret History of Colonel Hooke’s Negotiations in Scotland, in Favor of the Pretender. I was fortunate enough to find an original copy of Hooke’s account that not only became one of the treasures of my home library, but also proved invaluable in sorting out the movements of my characters.

  I’ve tried, wherever possible, to seek out the best evidence—the letters and the transcripts of the time. If an account was written down of what was said between two people, then I’ve had them say the same thing in my book. If Captain Gordon’s ship was in Leith harbor on a certain day, I’ve put him there. I’ve used this rule with even minor characters: “Mr Hall” was the alias commonly used by the priest Father Carnegy when he traveled in public on Jacobite business, and his visits to Slains on behalf of the Duke of Hamilton are a matter of fact, as is Mr Malcolm’s part in the invasion, and his going into hiding when it failed.

  That said, I have taken a couple of liberties. For all the research I’ve done on John Moray, I don’t know for certain that he was at Malplaquet. But since the only reference to his death that I have found fits with the date of Malplaquet, and since it helped my plot to have him there, I put him on that battlefield, where in the woods the Royal Irish Regiment in fact did meet and fight the Irish Regiment that fought for France and James.

  And while it’s also a recorded fact that Captain Gordon captured the Salisbury during the invasion, and that he was the only British captain in the fight to claim a French ship as his prize, there’s also little doubt that Gordon was a Jacobite. And since no one but Gordon knows exactly why he took that ship, I gave him an excuse that seemed to fit the man as I had come to know him.

  His Jacobite loyalties lasted the rest of his life. When Queen Anne died in 1714 and the first Hanoverian king, George I, was brought over to sit on the British throne, Gordon refused to take the oath of allegiance, and as a result was dismissed. He promptly accepted a commission in the Russian navy of Tsar Peter the Great, where he served with distinction and rose to be an admiral and the Governor of Kronstadt. Throughout his time in Russia he continued to promote the Jacobite cause, and kept up a correspondence with King James and his supporters. When he died in the spring of 1741, a wealthy and respected man, his obituary in The Gentleman’s Magazine stated he had always been ‘a true Friend to his Countrymen.’

  The Duke of Hamilton was not to be so fortunate. By 1711 his ambition was beginning to bear fruit—he’d been raised to the British peerage by Queen Anne, and had just been appointed ambassador to France. But before he could travel to Paris to take up his post, his longstanding dispute with a rival, Lord Mohun, flared into a duel. The two men met at dawn in Hyde Park, London, one November morning. Both men drew their swords, and in the fight that followed both were killed. The incident caused quite a scandal in its day, and the details of what really happened and why have been debated ever since. In death, as in life, he defies all attempts at an easy analysis.

  As for Moray’s uncle, Colonel Patrick Graeme, it is not difficult to trace his early life in Scotland, when he served as Captain of the Edinburgh Town Guard before his conscience made him take up arms for old King James and follow James to France in exile. But I haven’t yet discovered how he spent his later years, after the failed invasion in ’08. However, since I’m sure his nature would have kept him near the action, I am hopeful that I’ll someday come across a letter or a document that shines a light on his adventures in that time before his death in August, 1720.

  More light, too, is needed on Anne Drummond, Countess of Erroll, who becomes all but invisible in the years following the ’08—no easy task for a woman of such forceful character.

  Her son Charles, 13th Earl of Erroll, continued to fight for the rights of his countrymen after the Union which he had so passionately opposed. Though his position as Lord High Constable of Scotland meant he was expected to take part in the coronation of George I, he refused to attend the ceremony. He died not long after, in 1717, at the age of 40, unmarried and childless, the last male of his line. His title passed to his sister Mary who, like all the Countesses of Erroll, was a woman of great courage and a fierce supporter of the Stewart cause.

  Nathaniel Hooke, who had put so much time and effort into bringing about the invasion of 1708, was deeply disappointed by its failure, and highly critical of the French commander who had led it. Though he had a long and successful career in the diplomatic service of France, he returned to his memories of the ’08 in his later years, and with the help of his nephew began compiling his various papers and journals relating to the adventure. He died in 1738, before the tas
k was completed, and when his son attempted to sell the papers two years later an officer of the French court arrived instead to confiscate them. Those papers that were taken were presumably destroyed, and lost to history. But two packets of documents in Hooke’s nephew’s handwriting had escaped the attention of the French official, who luckily for us had no idea they contained Hooke’s own account of his negotiations for the planned invasion.

  Of such small unexpected accidents is history made.

  And no one was the victim of more accidents than young James Stewart—by his birthright James VIII of Scotland and III of England. There is some reason to suspect that his half-sister Queen Anne was indeed giving serious thought to naming James her heir, and in the last years of her reign there appears to have been a great deal of behind-the-scenes negotiating going on. In the midst of this, the war of the Spanish succession was ended by the Treaty of Utrecht, which among its terms demanded that Louis XIV expel James from France. James went willingly, moving his court to Lorraine where he promptly gave all of his Protestant servants the freedom to worship in their own faith, something he hadn’t been able to do when his court had been bound by French laws.

  But James was still a Catholic, and when Queen Anne died in 1714 it was the Protestant contender, George I, who won the crown.

  The reply was another Jacobite rising in 1715, and although this time James did manage to land safely in Scotland, just north of Slains at Peterhead, the golden opportunity of 1708 had passed. The western Presbyterians who had been so prepared in the ’08 to rise for James this time opposed him. The rebellion failed. James retreated to Lorraine, but King Louis XIV had died and without the old king to console and support him James found his French neighbors unwelcoming, so he moved his court again, at first to Avignon, and finally Rome.