A Strange Scottish Shore

by Juliana Gray

  “My God! Why?”

  “Why?” He looked at me in amazement. His eyes were wet. He gestured with his giant arm to the scene around him. “Why this? Why man is cruel? God alone is good.”

  I burst out bitterly, “How can you say that? How can you look upon all this, your own dead father, slaughtered before you, and say God is good?”

  Magnus sighed and wiped his cheek with his thumb. He looked back at his wife, who knelt on the stones, holding a sobbing countess in her arms.

  “God is good,” he said. “Man is cruel.”

  As I put my hand on his thick arm, I heard my name called out behind me, in an exhausted voice. I turned my head toward the sound. Silverton staggered into the hall, followed by two of Magnus’s guards, and perhaps it was only chance that the morning sun passed through a certain window along the eastern wall and struck his head at such an angle, he was drenched in gold. Or perhaps the light would have found him anyway, would have disobeyed the puny laws of physics and bent in his direction. I stared at his tall, graceful figure, his shoulders bent by weariness, his dirty, bloody clothes, and my misery slid away.

  I ran toward him and flung myself into his outstretched arms.

  “Did you find him?” I gasped.

  “No. Wretched bastard.” He held me tight against his chest, kissing my hair, kissing my temple, smelling rank and unwashed and beautiful, and then he set me back and looked over my shoulder at the scene around us. “My God. The poor woman.”

  Helen looked up and saw us. She detached the countess carefully and hurried to intercept Silverton. “Hunter!” she said, grabbing his arm. “What’s happened?”

  “I don’t know. We tried to follow him, but he seemed to know the place better than we did. Lost him.”

  “Lost him where?” asked Helen. “Where did you lose him? Where was he going?”

  “Near the granary,” he said.

  Helen turned to Magnus. Her face had lost all color.

  “The children!” she said, and I shall never forget the tone of her voice. I shall never forget the terror of it.

  • • •

  She had left them inside the granary, in the care of the nurse, because it was quiet and unlikely to be disturbed at such a time, and because it was located near the path to the village, where she had a fishing smack fully rigged and waiting to sail.

  She explained all this to me, panting, as we ran from the great hall to the stairs leading down to the working part of the castle, not far from the storeroom where we had made a breakfast of dried cod an hour before. I didn’t need the explanation—all that mattered was that they were safe, that Hunter hadn’t found them, that Hunter hadn’t already known where to find them—but she needed to give it.

  Because if she had left Olivia and Henry untouched in the attic, they would be in no danger.

  Neither of us could move swiftly, weighed down as we were by pregnancy and exhaustion and injury. We lost sight of Magnus and Silverton at the bottom of the stairs. The underground engulfed us, and as I felt the cold, damp air on my skin, the familiar smell of damp and human confinement, I had to force back a surge of panic. Helen clasped my hand and pulled me down the corridor, turned a corner and then another, past the narrow staircase we had taken earlier, until I felt a cold wind rush against my cheeks. The light grew. We turned a final corner and saw a small wooden door, open to the meadow behind the castle, and Helen made a strangled noise and darted forward to an opening in the wall, just inside the door.

  She ducked under the archway and screamed.

  I came up and caught her just as she fell to her knees, still screaming, over the still, blood-soaked body of the nurse, whose throat had been slit.

  Of the children, there was no sign, except for a jumble of faint, bloody footprints leading out the door to the meadow.

  “Come,” I said, “come. Quickly. He can’t have gone far.”

  I pulled her up and we staggered outside, blinking, to a cold, sunlit morning. Ahead, two tall figures bobbed along the path to the stables. We ran after them, all bruises forgotten, all fatigue evaporated by the manic pumping of our hearts. Helen reached them first, taking Magnus by the shoulders as they stood in the stable yard, interrogating a boy of about thirteen years, who scratched his head and pointed down the hill to the village, a mile away.

  “Where?” she whispered. “How long ago?”

  The boy shrugged, for he hadn’t the finely tuned sense of minutes and hours that the modern age stamps upon the human mind.

  “It can’t be more than half an hour,” Silverton said.

  “But he took the horses,” she said. “The horses I had ready for our escape.”

  “Can more be saddled?” I asked.

  “That will take time,” Silverton said. “I’ll go on ahead and see if I can catch up.”

  Magnus laid a hand on his shoulder. “No. I’ll go ahead. Keep the women safe.”

  Silverton nodded, and Magnus went off down the lane at a run. Helen made to run after him, but Silverton stopped her. “It’s best if he goes by himself,” he said. “You’d only slow him down, at the moment.”

  She looked at him fiercely and removed his hand from her arm. “Just you damned well try and stop me,” she said, and off she went.

  Silverton ran a hand through his hair and swore. He turned to the boy and barked an order in Norse, and the boy went running toward the castle gatehouse. Then he pivoted back to me. “Can you ride a horse, do you think?”

  “Not very well.”

  “Then I suppose it’s time to learn.”

  • • •

  We didn’t stop to saddle the horses. Silverton fitted a rope to the headstall of a gray pony, and another to a bay. He chucked me up on top of the gray and swung up behind me, and off we went, leading the bay, until we caught up with Helen.

  “Can you ride?” he shouted.

  “Yes!”

  He tossed her the rope, got down, and helped her scramble on the back of the bay pony. She clapped her heels into the animal’s sides and went off at a canter, and I saw at once that she hadn’t lied. She stuck to him like a burr, and the two of them raised a cloud of dust all the way into the village, while our gray, burdened by the additional weight, heaved gamely after them. My thighs ached, my bottom bounced against the pony’s back. Silverton gripped my waist with one hand and the rope with the other, guiding the pony by I know not what signal. Possibly he wasn’t guiding at all, and the poor beast only blindly followed the track and the horse ahead. We reached the first of the stone cottages, and the villagers came out in the lane and watched us, amazed. Silverton shouted a question to one of them, and he pointed to the harbor.

  “Damn,” Silverton said. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  We reached the harbor a moment after Helen, who leapt off her pony and ran to the water’s edge. “It’s gone!” she screamed. “It’s gone!”

  “What’s gone?” I asked as Silverton handed me down from the pony.

  “The boat! The boat I had ready!”

  Magnus stood at the edge of the wooden quay, firing questions at the fisherman who stood there, quaking, next to his craft. He pointed out to sea. Magnus looked up and shaded his eyes against the bright sun, and a shout escaped him, a noise of fury and despair.

  “No!” Helen screamed.

  I grabbed Silverton’s arm. “Where’s he taking them?”

  “Damned if I know. Magnus!”

  Magnus turned, and I have never seen such an expression on a man’s face, as if someone had plunged a claw through his belly and removed his vital organs.

  “We’ll rig my boat. Come along!”

  Silverton was already running along the quay to his own small vessel, bobbing at its mooring. He jumped aboard, discovered the canvas sail folded under the seat at the stern, began to fasten it to the mast. Magnus stepped in after h
im, making the boat rock violently, and shipped the rudder in place with expert, efficient movements.

  Helen and I ran to the water’s edge. “For God’s sake, hurry!” she said, agonized.

  Magnus straightened from his task, just as Silverton gave the sheet a last tug. The sail made a pure white triangle against the blue sky.

  “All set?” Silverton asked.

  “Go. Get off. I go alone. She will sail faster.”

  “But—”

  Magnus shook his head. “No. I give you command of Hoy. I need you to stay, Fingal. To guard my wife. He wants her.”

  “What?” said Helen. She started forward, and Magnus stepped quickly off the boat and took her in his arms, not to say farewell but to stop her from climbing aboard.

  “You must stay,” he said to her. “I will bring them back. I swear it.”

  She swore at him in Norse, and he answered by kissing her. Silverton leapt to the quay and began to untie the rope holding the boat to its mooring. Helen’s arms went around Magnus’s thick neck. She was sobbing and swearing, both at once, and Magnus put his hand on her head and pressed his cheek against hers. I saw with surprise that his eyes ran with tears. He took her by the shoulders and set her back on her feet, and I shall never forget the way he kissed her a final time, brief and tender, before turning back to the boat and wiping his eyes.

  Silverton stepped in and gripped his hand. The sun was bright in his hair.

  “She’s yours,” he said. “Godspeed.”

  So the Lady slipped her arms and legs into the suit she had worn when she left her old land, and when she was done, her son dragged her into the water and said, ‘Go, swim into the bay toward the ship, or I shall go inside the cottage and slaughter the bastard children you have borne this Fisherman, and he will return to find their slain bodies on the floor, and believe you have killed them.’ The Lady waited in vain to hear the bells of the church ring three times, but no sound reached her ears, and her son in his impatience took out a knife to prod her ribs, so she drew breath and plunged into the cold water, without looking back at the cottage where she had known all the joys on earth . . .

  THE BOOK OF TIME, A. M. HAYWOOD (1921)

  Sixteen

  Four days later

  Winter blew back into Hoy the day after Magnus left, pelting us with sleet and misery, and though we lit braziers and covered the shutters with animal hides to keep out the gales, we could not banish the cold.

  “I’m going mad,” Helen said, rising once more from her stool to lift the hide from the window and stare at the harbor, or rather the patch of mist where the harbor ought to be. “Something’s happened. Can’t we send a messenger to Thurso?”

  “Not in this weather. Sit down, for heaven’s sake. You’re letting in a draft.”

  “I don’t care.” But she dropped the hide and returned to her seat. Her cheeks were pink, her nose tipped in red. I thought she might have a cold coming on, although she didn’t complain, at least about her health. She rubbed her hands before the brazier. On the floor beside her lay a discarded embroidery frame, on which I was attempting to teach her to cross-stitch. Not that I enjoyed embroidery myself—in fact, I detested it—but her mind and her fingers needed occupation.

  “He’ll be back, Helen,” I said quietly. “Didn’t he promise you? Hunter’s no match for him.”

  She put her face in her hands. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  I bit my lip in remorse. I had forgotten again. I couldn’t seem to make my own peace with the notion that Hunter was Helen’s son. She was too young to have a fully grown child; she was too good to have a child so utterly lacking in human empathy. I stared at her head, bent at an angle of deep distress, and the whiteness of her hands. What was it like, to know that the child you had carried beneath your heart, into whom you had poured all your love, all your tender hope, had grown into a monster? Had held a pistol to your own temple? And you could not wish him death. Even as he threatened your husband, your children, even as your own happiness and safety depended on his defeat, you could not bear to see him vanquished.

  “Shall I call for wine?” I asked gently. “Some other refreshment?”

  “No, thank you.” She lifted her hands away and found her handkerchief. “I’m sorry. I should be stronger. After everything I’ve been through, everything I’ve seen, I really should just buck up, you know?”

  “When the weather clears. As soon as the weather clears, Magnus will return with the children.”

  “Yes,” she said tonelessly, wiping her eyes.

  I leaned forward. “He won’t kill him. He would never kill your son.”

  “But Hunter would kill him, if he could. God, what happened to my son? I just wish I knew. Oh, I can imagine, of course. From his accent, I suppose Tom took him back to America and raised him there, with all the other rich boys. And of course he turned out like Tom. What else could I expect?” She laughed bitterly.

  “Was he as terrible as that?”

  “He was just an a hole, that’s all. I married an a hole. It happens. And I deserved it. He was married. He was forty-three years old, he was a Wall Street banker, in Los Angeles for the Olympics, entertaining clients. Mr. Thomas Spillane, managing director for Latin American equities at Sterling Bates and Company. Terribly impressive. He was incredibly polished, like my father. Incredibly rich, like my father. And I was incredibly young and stupid. I was the trophy, don’t you see. The pretty blond Olympic diver. Britain’s Golden Girl. Oh, I was something, all right. Nineteen years old, can you believe it? He swept me off my feet. I didn’t know he had a wife, at first. By the time I did, I didn’t care. He told me his marriage was already over, they hadn’t slept together in years, the old story. I don’t believe I even thought about how she felt. His two kids. How horrible is that? All I remember thinking was that the whole thing was really her own fault, she should have looked after herself better, looked after Tom better. I really thought that. So I expect this is my punishment.”

  “It’s not a punishment. Certainly not a just punishment.”

  “Karma, then. That’s the word we use. Well, the karma kicked right in. I fell pregnant almost immediately. He divorced his wife, married me just before Hunter was born, and while I was still in the hospital I found he was having an affair with somebody else. So it’s true what they say. When a man marries his mistress, he creates an open position.”

  She was staring into the brazier, not at me, and the coals gave a little color to her face. A strand of hair escaped from her headdress to curl against her cheek. This was the first time she had spoken to me of her past, and I hardly dared to say a word, in case she might realize I was listening.

  “Anyway,” she went on, gathering herself a little, “he took that house in the north of Scotland one summer, when Hunter was six, specifically to get me out of the way so he could freely shag his new girl all over London. I was miserable. I think I might have killed myself if it weren’t for Hunter. Tom named him that. I wanted to call him Archie, but Tom said that was a sissy’s name. God, he was such a sweet child! I missed him so much. That first year, it was like my own heart had been cut out of my body. I couldn’t understand how I was still breathing. I couldn’t feel anything. Magnus was so patient, he just waited for me to grieve. I think I learned to love him only because of that. He was so good. I couldn’t believe a man could be that good, that faithful, day after day, never pushing me, only waiting for me to love him back. Then I looked at him one day and I realized I did. I loved him. So I slept with him.” She looked at me at last, and this time there was a little smile at the corner of her mouth. “That went well.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Mind you, I’d only ever slept with Tom before. I spent my teens just training, training, training. Trying to please Daddy. I was literally a virgin when I met Tom. Sorry, I don’t mean to embarrass you. But you’ve got to understand how absolutely brilli
ant it was, going to bed with somebody who actually cared about me. It was the difference between winter and summer. It was—God, it was amazing, it was bloody amazing. I already loved Magnus, but after that night I fell in love with him, and the best part was that instead of fizzling out, it just kept getting better. Do you know what that’s like, to wake up every morning and fall in love with somebody all over again?”

  “Yes,” I said softly.

  “It’s like a drug, except it’s good for you. No side effects. Oh, but you know that already. He’s quite a prince, your Fingal. Your fair-haired stranger. My God, I envy you. No complications, no regrets, no bloody strings holding you to that other world, that horrible world.”

  “It’s not so horrible.”

  “Yes, it is. I’d rather die here in dirt and chaos, die in childbirth or some stupid infection, than go back to that shallow, awful place. Look what it did to my son. My sweet boy. Tom turned him into a monster.” She jumped up from her seat and went to the window again, lifting the hide, peering between the slats of the shutter. The gray light changed her face. I stared at her graceful figure, the slight bulge of her belly beneath the long overdress, almost exactly the shape of mine. She let the hide fall, but she didn’t turn. “Night’s starting to fall. I miss him most at night. Especially during these frightful gales.”

  “It won’t be long now.”

  “Oh, stop. You’ve been saying that for days.” She wrapped her arms around her middle. “I want my children back. I want my husband. I want—oh, God, I want our cottage back. Our beautiful, simple life. Those pearls. As soon as Henry brought them in, I knew everything was going to change. A wooden box of priceless pearls, just sitting there, like a test. The way the gods test mortals. Except it wasn’t the gods. I suppose it was probably Hunter himself. He planned everything else so well.”

  “Except that you escaped.”

  “Yes. When we reached Hoy. He brought me to shore and dragged me into a cave—”

  “The cave! In the inlet?”

  “Yes, it was an inlet. Not far from here. And I felt this terrible power come over me, just as when I was first hurled into this time, and I—I don’t know how—he was holding on to my wetsuit, we were struggling, and somehow I broke free and ran out the cave, and the next thing I knew, I woke up on that same shore in 1906—”