A Strange Scottish Shore

by Juliana Gray

  Silverton swallowed and said, “We haven’t much time. Hunter’s chaps will be awakening soon, and even if they’re not quite in fighting form, we’re only three, and largely unarmed.”

  “Not quite,” said Helen. She reached into the folds of her cloak and pulled out a gun: not the sleek machine Hunter had brought with him, but the more rounded, familiar shape of a modern revolver. She handed it to Silverton. “I presume you’re the best shot. I have only a dozen bullets, so you must use it carefully. The chambers are fully loaded, at present.”

  He took the gun reverently and turned it about in his hands. “Max’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good man. If you see him again—”

  “I don’t mean to see him again. My life is here. I’ve already taken the children and their nurse to a place of safety—”

  “When was this?”

  “During the night. Hunter seems to have forgotten their existence, or perhaps he didn’t know where they were being kept.”

  Silverton nodded. “Magnus only allowed a few people ever to see them. How did you know where they were?”

  “It’s too much to explain.” She finished the fish and brushed her hands on her skirt. “They’re waiting for us in the cove, with a ship. There’s not a moment to lose.”

  “Yes, let’s get to it,” Silverton said. “Before Hunter decides to kill him.”

  “Oh, he won’t kill him, not yet,” Helen said. “He needs Magnus.”

  “For what?”

  “For me, of course. All of this, everything he’s done, it’s to get me back. But I won’t go.”

  “To get you back?” said Silverton. “I always thought he took you for ransom, when he came for you three years ago. That it was something to do with Magnus’s new fortune. Do you mean he wants you personally?”

  “Yes. He wants to take me back with him. Back to our own time, our old life.”

  “I don’t quite—I beg your pardon—were you lovers? Man and wife?”

  She recoiled. “Oh, my God, no! I mean, I had a husband, of course. Hunter’s father.”

  “His father!” I exclaimed, forgetting to be quiet.

  “Yes.” Helen looked at me, and though the light was dim, I could see the agony in her face. “Hunter was my little boy once. My wee treasure. And when I disappeared into this world, his father raised him instead. His father raised him to be just like himself. And now he wants me back.”

  “Who wants you back?” Silverton asked. “Hunter, or his father?”

  She put her face in her hands. “Both.”

  • • •

  The plan was a simple one. Those were the ones that worked best, Silverton explained, for the obvious reason that fewer things went wrong. He was to go ahead and find the cell where Magnus was being kept, while Helen and I kept watch at either end of the long corridor encompassing the dungeon. I took Helen’s knife, while she took the gun back from Silverton. Max had shown her how to use the thing, whereas I knew nearly nothing about revolvers.

  But as we crept down the dark, silent hallway from the storerooms to the dungeon, I wondered if perhaps we would have done better to wait. To go into the village and find help and weapons, to construct some robust plot to take back the castle by force. Except, by then, the alarm would be raised. Hunter would have discovered our absence, and we would have lost the element of surprise.

  Better to act now, I told myself, keeping my gaze on the faint shadow of Helen’s back as we moved along the flagstones, clutching our weapons. My ears strained for noise, for any clue that the castle had awakened. There was nothing. Only the rustle of our own passage. Only the smell of our own bodies, and the damp sourness of the dungeon itself. As if the walls themselves were lying in wait for us.

  For an instant, my mind flew back to that stealthy journey through the bowels of Thurso Castle, following Magnusson to the ledge by the sea to find the place where Hunter had plunged. Well, he’s gone now, God rest his soul, Magnusson had said confidently—my God, I could almost hear the philosophical cadence of his voice—and where were we now? Creeping along a different corridor, in a different castle, behind a different man, but it was all the same. Damp, chilly, dark, the stone walls pressing upon you, no end in sight. My body ached, my feet and my wrists hurt. I wiped my damp right hand on my dress and clutched the knife more firmly into my palm.

  Just ahead, Helen stopped and made a motion with her arm. I paused obediently behind her. I saw that her hand was shaking, that her profile—scarcely visible in the charcoal light—seemed sharp and keen, almost beatific in her longing for the man imprisoned in one of the cells nearby. Imprisoned by her own son. The hair tingled on the back of my neck. I put my left hand to my abdomen and looked over Helen’s shoulder at the gray smudge that was Silverton, moving cautiously ahead to check for guards, his blond head finding what little light worked its way through the darkness. In that moment, every ounce of love I had ever felt for him, every atom, seemed to rise up in my chest and choke the air from my lungs. I flung my arm out to brace myself on the wall, and Helen half turned to see what was wrong.

  Ahead of us, Silverton turned and motioned. That was the signal. I remained in place, turning to keep watch on the corridor we had just crept down, while Helen went ahead with Silverton to the other corner. In the middle, according to Silverton, a hallway split off to the cell blocks, like the stem of a T. Helen and I should wait on our corners, watching for the approach of any additional guards, until Silverton emerged again. With Magnus, God willing.

  I watched them go, over my shoulder, until the darkness swallowed them. Two gravid women, Silverton had said. I’ve never had the pleasure of undertaking a mission with two gravid women. He’d said the words cheerfully, as if this were an improvement over his usual circumstances, but as I stood there in the hallway, nearly blind, stiff with cold, I saw the hopelessness of it. One man, two women in the family way. What chance did we have against a dozen guards, even drunk?

  I kept my gaze—such as it was—on my assigned corner, but my ears strained to hear the sounds from the territory behind me. If I went absolutely still, if I tuned my entire body into a mere conductor of atmospheric vibration, I could just detect the stirring of human bodies. Not the sound, exactly, but the sense of them, respiring and moving and existing. The smell of human perspiration. Human excrement. Foul human breath.

  Footsteps.

  I straightened and peered into the gloom.

  Yes, footsteps. Quiet, muffled, distant. A single, quick pair of feet. A woman? I adjusted my grip on the knife, touched my thumb to the razor edge of the blade. My heart flew, my blood warmed. My God, could I do it? The beat of feet grew sharper, and then a light appeared, soft and golden, bouncing in the same rhythm as the footsteps. It grew in a lurid halo along the stone wall, while my muscles tensed, my mind keened to absolute attention. Larger and larger the light grew, until the shape of a human body appeared suddenly around the corner, approached, saw me, froze.

  My God, I knew her. The serving maid who had poured my wine at the wedding feast. A comely girl of perhaps sixteen, round-cheeked, dark-haired. She carried a candle in a plain pewter holder, which she shielded with one hand. The rank smell of tallow crept into my nostrils. We stared at each other. Her eyes widened with recognition. I put one finger to my lips, and she nodded, turned, and flew back the way she had come.

  As I sagged in relief against the wall, a faint shout sounded from behind, and cut off abruptly.

  Silverton, I thought.

  I wanted to run, I wanted to find the source of that noise, I wanted to know what was happening, but I could not. I was chained to this damned corner. I was no soldier, but I knew this was my post, and I should hold it at all costs. How many of Hunter’s men were guarding those cells? Were they all awake? Were they armed? I flattened myself against the wall and tried to watch both sides, back and forth, the corner of ap
proach and the hallway where Silverton had disappeared.

  There was no clock in this vast space, no way to count the seconds and the minutes that passed after that first faint shout. I counted them anyway. I felt the beat of time in my bones.

  I have to go, I thought. I can’t wait here any longer.

  Just as I pushed myself from the wall, another sound reached my ears, echoing from the stone: the sharp, surprised cry of a woman, calling my name.

  I bolted off down the corridor, toward the corner assigned to Helen, passing the hallway to the dungeon cells, running so quickly, so heedlessly that I ran into her almost before I saw her. She was not alone. Holding her right arm wrenched behind her, pressing a pistol to the back of her head, was Hunter. Was her son.

  • • •

  When I first showed signs of being with child, I confess, I avoided them. I knew the possibility existed, even the likelihood; as the summer passed into autumn, Silverton had spent himself so often inside me, we might have conceived an army. But I had never thought of myself as a mother. I had so little knowledge of maternity; my own mother died when I was five, and my father had never remarried. I had never expected to marry; I had certainly never expected to have children.

  But when couples meet in bed, without any modern means of keeping the essence of life at bay, children are the likely result. I entered willingly into the pleasures of Silverton’s bed, knowing these facts, yet still I waited patiently for my courses to make their regular appearance; and as the days passed, the weeks passed, I felt a little betrayed that they did not. Until my body began to swell and grow tender, and my appetite grew fussy, and one fine, frosty morning in late autumn, I looked down at my breasts and I looked at Silverton, pulling his tunic over his head, and I heard myself say, “I believe I may be with child.”

  I believe. That’s what I said, and yet a small part of me did not believe it. Did not translate this idea of pregnancy into a real, living child, until the day when at last the babe grew large enough to flutter against the sides of my womb and make himself known to me. I remember I was lying in bed in the moments before sleep, my husband stretched soundlessly along my side, the still, black night pressing around us, and there came a tickle. The delicate beat of a butterfly’s wings.

  And I felt that flutter in wonder, and put my hand on my belly for the first time, and for the first time I said the word mother to myself. I tasted it on my tongue. I saw a baby before me, I saw a pair of round infant eyes, I felt the quickening of a brand-new passion inside me. I remember thinking how strange a bond this was, host and parasite, the advantage all to one side, and yet I knew I would pour all my life’s blood into that growing creature, if I could. If I had to.

  I would die for him.

  • • •

  Now this bond stood before me in adult form. Mother and son, the advantage all to one side, the child poised to kill the parent. There was not enough light to see their faces properly, but still I found the terror in Helen’s eyes, the fury in Hunter’s. He was a few inches taller than she, and her temple banged on his chin. In the flat, dim light, his ginger hair was the same color as hers, so that you could not quite tell them apart.

  “Don’t do it,” I whispered. “You can’t do it. Your own mother.”

  “B , you don’t know. She left,” he said. “She f ing left us to live with him. She had his f ing babies.”

  “She couldn’t help it. She didn’t know how to return to you.”

  “She f ed him. She was married to Dad, and she f ed him. Giant ugly-a cretin.”

  “She thought she would never see your father again. Isn’t that right, Helen? She fell in love again. It’s nobody’s fault, least of all hers. Don’t you want her to be happy?”

  As I spoke, I slipped the knife into the fold of my dress, out of sight. Helen’s face was frozen in terror. Where was her revolver? Had she dropped it?

  “Actually, I don’t give a s if she’s happy or not. We’ve just got some unfinished business back in the good old twenty-first century, that’s all. Nothing personal. Granddad’s inheritance. Unless she turns up, it all goes to the f ing RSPCA. Sooo . . .” He shrugged as he stretched out the word.

  I thought of Silverton. I heard his voice, echoing back: She jumped straight into another man’s bed, and then she bolted with him, and I never saw her again.

  “You’re lying.” I shifted the knife lightly in my palm. “It is personal. You wouldn’t have done all this if it weren’t. You’ve been obsessed with this all your life, haven’t you? Your mother leaving you.”

  “You know what? Pretty sure you’re not a qualified therapist, Prim and Proper. So you just b er off, all right? Go back to f ing your cretin. Pretend you never saw anything. I’m done here. Got what I wanted.”

  Behind me, the shouting had started, and my mind seemed to divide into two—one side listening painfully to each noise, each thump, each clang, each exclamation, and the other side focused upon the man in front of me, holding a pistol to Helen’s petrified head.

  “No, you haven’t,” I said. “You may have won back your mother’s body, but you’ve destroyed her soul. You can’t have back what you lost. But you’re an adult now, you can give her back what she’s lost. You can give her back the man she loves. The life she loves, the children who need her. Your brother and sister.”

  “Oh, f off. I told you, I don’t give a s . I’m in it for the money.”

  “And I say you’re not. You wouldn’t still be standing here—”

  But my words were swallowed up in the tide that engulfed us. Hunter looked up in amazement to the hallway behind me, and I lunged without thought, knocking the pistol from his hand. It struck the ground and went off, and somebody screamed. Helen staggered backward against the wall of the corridor.

  I turned and raised my knife against the oncoming scramble of shouting, bearded men, but somebody grabbed my elbow and my wrist, forcing the blade free. I swung my head and bit his hand, and he dropped the knife. I watched it fall, threw myself downward to grab it, and Helen screamed, “No! God! Don’t hurt him!”

  Hunter turned to her, as if he’d forgotten she was there, and reached for her arm.

  A roar filled our ears. In the next instant, a massive bulk blurred between Hunter and me. Magnus, streaked with blood, both old and fresh. He took hold of Helen’s shoulders and lifted her away from her son as easily as you might lift a baby from a cradle, and she cried something out in a voice that sounded as if it were dragging across shoals.

  But Magnus did not stop to answer her. He turned in fury to Hunter, raising his enormous fist. Hunter dove for the floor, and I thought he was only avoiding the blow, but when he stumbled back to his feet he held the pistol in his left hand.

  “Watch out!” I screamed. I tried to kick it from his hand, but I was too far away and lost my balance, crashing against the wall. Hunter switched the pistol to his right hand and rose to his feet. Magnus whirled around to insert himself between Helen and the pistol. Lifted his elbow to dislodge the gun from Hunter’s hand. The gun went off, a shower of chipped stone came down from the ceiling, and a pair of men flew past Magnus and Helen to tackle Hunter to the ground.

  One of them was Silverton.

  “No!” Helen screamed, darting around Magnus, reaching for Silverton’s arm. In confusion, he loosened his grip, and Hunter writhed free.

  “Get him!” I called. I levered myself from the wall and started forward, but I was already too late. Hunter bolted down the corridor and melted into the darkness.

  Silverton scrambled to his feet, turned to me, and took my elbows.

  “Are you all right?” he demanded. Bright, new blood flowed from a cut above his left eyebrow.

  “Yes! Your face—”

  He released me and whipped down the corridor, where Hunter had vanished.

  I started off after him, but a hand gripped my arm and kept me
back. I turned my head and saw it belonged to Magnus, who held Helen against his chest with the other arm. His face was haggard and thunderous. “Stay,” he commanded me.

  “But the men—”

  “Are mine. Fingal opened the dungeon. The castle is ours.”

  • • •

  We made our way, dazed and shivering, into the great hall. The morning sun dazzled the air through the open windows, illuminating the shambles of the day before. The tables were overturned, the food and wine spilled across the rushes. A pair of dogs moved about, stomachs bulging, picking at the destruction.

  It’s all right, I thought. It’s over. Thorvar and his band of traitors now inhabited the dungeon, in place of Magnus’s men, and I hardly dared to think of their fate in this brutal, pitiless world. It would be swift and final. Danger sliced off at the neck. Peace restored, the castle cleaned and returned to order.

  But the knot of worry remained in my chest.

  I turned to Magnus, who stood aside with Helen near the enormous, empty fireplace. Her face was turned into his chest, and he was stroking her hair. He had sent two men after Silverton and Hunter, and none of them had yet returned.

  I opened my mouth to demand news, but I had no chance to speak. A small, keening cry rose behind me, and a figure in blue darted past to throw herself on the body of a man who lay near the dais at the end of the hall. Her bare head shone silver in the sunshine, and I recognized the Countess of Thurso.

  Helen raised her head and made a noise of sympathy. She detached herself from her husband and followed the countess, and I observed Magnus’s face as he watched her go. Adoration so intense, it was almost agony.

  I moved to his side. “What is it?”

  “My father,” he said tonelessly. He lifted his hand, stained with blood, and made a motion to his neck.