Sophia's Secret

by Susanna Kearsley

  ‘Slains? Aye, I can take you over that. But it’s not up the coast, it’s down. At Cruden Bay.’

  I stared. ‘Where?’

  ‘Cruden Bay. You would have missed it, coming up the way you did.’

  Jane, sharp as ever, noticed something in my face, in my expression. ‘What?’ she asked.

  I never ceased to be surprised by serendipity – the way chance happenings collided with my life. Of all the places that I could have stopped, I thought. Aloud I only said, ‘It’s nothing. Could we go tomorrow, Alan?’

  ‘Aye. Tell you what – I’ll take you early so that you can have your look from out at sea, and if you want when we get back I’ll watch wee Jack awhile and Jane can drive you down to have a wander round. It’ll do you both good, get a breath of sea air.’

  And so that’s what we did.

  What I saw from the air looked much larger than what I had seen from the ground – a roofless, sprawling ruin that seemed to sit right at the edge of the cliffs, with the sea boiling white far below. It sent one small cold thrill down my spine, and I knew that familiar sensation enough to be frankly impatient to get on the ground, so that Jane could take over and drive me back down.

  There were two other cars in the car park this time, and the snow of the footpath showed deep, sliding prints. I ploughed ahead of Jane, and raised my face towards the salt blasts of the wind that left a taste upon my lips and set me shivering again within the warm folds of my jacket.

  I confess I couldn’t, afterwards, remember any other people being there, although I knew there had been. Nor could I recall too many details of the ruin itself – just images, of pointed walls and hard pink granite flecked with grey that glittered in the light…the one high square-walled tower standing solid near the cliff’s edge…the silence of the inner chambers, where the wind stopped raging and began to moan and weep, and where the bare roof timbers overhead cast shadows on the drifted snow. In one large room a massive gaping window faced the sea, and when I stood and leant my hands against the sunwarmed sill I noticed, looking down, the imprints of a small dog’s paws, perhaps a spaniel’s, and beside them deeper footprints showing where a man had stood and looked, as I was looking, out towards the limitless horizon.

  I could almost feel him standing at my shoulder now, but in my mind he’d changed so that he wasn’t any more the modern stranger I had talked to in the car park yesterday, but someone of an older time, a man with boots and cloak and sword. The thought of him became so real I turned…and found Jane watching me.

  She smiled at the expression on my face. She knew it well, from all the times that she’d been present when my characters began to stir, and talk, and take on life. Her voice was casual. ‘You know that you can always come and stay with us, and work. We have the room.’

  I shook my head. ‘You have a baby. You don’t need a house guest, too.’

  She looked at me again, and what she saw made her decide. ‘Then come on. Let’s go down and find a place for you to let in Cruden Bay.’

  Chapter Two

  Cruden Bay’s Main Street sloped gently downhill and bent round to the right and then left again, curving away out of sight to the harbour. It was narrow, a line of joined cottages and a few shops on the one side, and on the other a swiftly running stream that surged between its frozen banks and passed a single shop, a newsagent’s, before it ran to meet the wide and empty sweep of beach that stretched away beyond the high snow-covered dunes.

  The Post Office was marked by its red sign against the grey stone walls, and by the varied notices displayed in its front window announcing items for sale and upcoming events, including an enticingly named ‘Buttery Morning’ to be held at the local hall. Inside the shop were postcards, books, some souvenirs for tourists, and a very helpful woman. Yes, she knew of one place in the village that might suit me. A little cottage, basic, nothing fancy on the inside. ‘It was old Miss Keith’s before she passed away,’ she said. ‘Her brother has it now, but since he has a house himself down by the harbour, he’s no use for it. He lets it out to tourists in the summer. Winters, there’ll be no one there except his sons from time to time, and they’re not often home. The younger lad, he likes to travel, and his brother’s at the university in Aberdeen, so Jimmy Keith would probably be glad to let you have the place these next few months. I can give him a phone, if you like.’

  And so it came to pass that, with a newly purchased pack of postcards stuffed into the pocket of my coat, I walked with Jane along the sidewalk by the rushing stream and down to where the road bent round and changed its name to Harbour Street. The houses here were like the ones along Main Street higher up – still low and joined to one another, and across from them a series of small gardens, some with sheds, sprang up between us and the wide pink beach.

  From down here I could see the beach itself was huge, a curve at least two miles long with dunes that rose like hills behind it, casting shadows on the shore. A narrow white wood footbridge spanned the shallow gully of the stream to where those dunes began, but even as I paused and looked at it and wondered if I might have time to go across, Jane said with satisfaction, ‘There’s the path,’ and shepherded me past the bridge and round to where a wide and slushy pathway veered up from the street to climb a good-sized hill. Ward Hill, the woman at the Post Office had called it.

  It was a headland, high and rounded, thrusting out above the sea, and as I came up to the top I looked behind and saw I’d climbed above the level of the dunes and had a view not only of the beach, but of the distant houses and the hills beyond. And turning back again I saw, towards the north, the blood-red ruin of Slains castle clear against cliffs of the next headland.

  I felt a small thrill. ‘Oh, how perfect.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jane said, slowly. ‘It looks rather dismal.’ She was looking at the cottage, standing all alone here on the hill. It had been rubble-built, with plain square whitewashed walls beneath a roof of old grey slates that dripped with dampness from the melting snow. The windows were small, with their frames peeling paint and the worn blinds inside were pulled down like closed eyelids, as if the small cottage had wearied of watching the endless approach and retreat of the sea.

  I reached out to knock at the door. ‘It’s just lonely.’

  ‘So will you be, if you live up here. Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea.’

  ‘It was your idea.’

  ‘Yes, but what I had in mind was more a cosy little place right in the village, near the shops…’

  ‘This suits me fine.’ I knocked again. ‘I guess he isn’t here yet.’

  ‘Try the bell.’

  I hadn’t seen the doorbell, buried deep within the tangle of a stubborn climbing vine with tiny leaves that shivered every time the wind blew from the sea. I stretched my hand to press it, but a man’s voice from the path behind me warned, ‘It winna dee ye ony good, it disna ring. The salt fae the sea ruins the wiring, fast as I fix it. Besides,’ said the man, as he came up to join us, ‘I’m nae in the hoose tae be hearin ye, am I?’ His smile made his rough, almost ugly face instantly likeable. He’d have been well into his sixties, with whitening hair and the fit build and ruddy complexion of someone who’d worked hard outdoors all his life. The woman at the Post Office had seemed sure I’d like him, although she had warned me I might have some trouble understanding him.

  ‘He speaks the Doric,’ she had said. ‘The language of this area. You’ll likely find it difficult to follow what he says.’

  I didn’t, actually. His speech was broad and quick, and if I’d had to translate every word I might have had a problem, but it wasn’t hard to catch the general sense of what he meant when he was talking.

  Holding my hand out, I said, ‘Mr Keith? Thanks for coming. I’m Carrie McClelland.’

  ‘A pleasure tae meet ye.’ His handshake was sure. ‘But I’m nae Mr Keith. Ma dad was Mr Keith, and he’s been deid and beeried twenty years. Ye ca’ me Jimmy.’

  ‘Jimmy, then.’

&
nbsp; Jane introduced herself, never content to be out of the action for long. She didn’t exactly nudge me to one side, but she was an agent, after all, and though she likely didn’t even notice it herself, she liked to take control whenever somebody was bargaining.

  She wasn’t pushy, really, but she led the conversation, and I hid my smile and let her lead, content to follow after them as Jimmy Keith fitted his key in the lock of the low cottage door, and then with a jiggle and thump of the latch made it swing inwards, scraping the tiles of the floor.

  My first impression was one of general dimness, but when the blinds were raised with a rattle and the faded curtains pushed back, I could see the place, although not large, was comfortable – a sitting room, with thinning Persian carpets on the floor, two cushioned armchairs and a sofa, and a long scrubbed wooden table pushed against the farther wall, with wooden kitchen chairs around it. The kitchen had been fitted at the one end of the cottage with the snugness of a galley on a ship. Not many cupboards, nor much countertop, but everything was in its place and useful, from the one sink with its built-in stainless draining board to the small-sized electric stove that had, I guessed, been meant to take the place of the old coal-fired Aga standing solid in its chimney alcove on the back wall.

  The Aga, so Jimmy assured me, still worked. ‘It’s a bit contermacious – that’s difficult, like – but it aye heats the room, and ye’ll save on the electric.’

  Jane, standing by the front door looking up, made a pointed remark about that being handy. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I haven’t seen one of these since I rented my first flat.’

  I came to gaze up, with Jane, at the little black metal box fixed to the top of the door jamb, with the glassed-in meter and assorted gauges set above it. I had heard of such contraptions, but I’d never seen or used one.

  Jimmy Keith looked up as well. ‘Michty aye,’ he agreed. ‘Ye dinna see those ony mair.’

  It took 50p coins, he explained, and was fed like a parking meter – run out of coins and the power went off. ‘But nae bother,’ he promised. He’d sell me a roll of the coins and, when I’d used them all, he’d come open the meter and take them back out and just sell me the coins back again.

  Jane gave the box one final doubtful look and turned to carry on with her inspection. There wasn’t much left, just a bedroom, not large, at the back, and an unexpectedly roomy bathoom across from it, complete with footed tub and what the British called an ‘airing cupboard’, open shelves set round a yellow water heater, good for storing towels and drying clothes.

  Jane moved to stand beside me. ‘Well?’

  ‘I like it.’

  ‘Not much to it.’

  ‘I don’t need much when I’m working.’

  She considered this, then turned to Jimmy Keith. ‘What sort of rent would you be asking?’

  Which was my cue, I knew, to leave them to it. Jane had often told me how inept I was at making deals, and she was right. The cost of things had never much concerned me. Someone told me the price, and if I could afford it, I paid it, and didn’t waste time wondering if I could have had the thing for less. I had other things to occupy my mind.

  I wandered through again into the sitting room, and stood a moment looking out the window at the headland reaching out into the sea, and dark along its length the ruined castle walls of Slains.

  Watching, I could feel again the stirrings of my characters – the faint, as yet inaudible, suggestion of their voices, and their movements close around me, in the way someone can sense another’s presence in a darkened room. I didn’t need to shut my eyes. They were already fixed, not truly seeing, on the window glass, in that strange writer’s trance that stole upon me when my characters began to speak, and I tried hard to listen.

  I’d expected that Nathaniel Hooke would have the most to say, and that his voice would be the strongest and the first that I would hear, but in the end the words I heard came not from him, but from a woman, and the words themselves were unexpected.

  ‘So, you see, my heart is held forever by this place,’ she said. ‘I cannot leave.’

  I cannot leave.

  That’s all she said, the voice was gone, but still that phrase stayed with me and repeated like a litany, so urgently that when the deal was done and Jane and Jimmy Keith had settled things and I was asked when I would like to take possession, I said, ‘Could I have it now? Tonight?’

  They looked at me, the two of them, as though I’d lost my mind.

  ‘Tonight?’ Jane echoed. ‘But your things are still at our house, and you’re flying back to France tomorrow, aren’t you?’

  ‘Onywye,’ said Jimmy Keith, ‘it’s nae been cleaned.’

  They were right, I knew, and really, one or two days more would hardly make a difference. So we set the date for Wednesday, just the day after tomorrow. But that didn’t stop me feeling, as we locked the cottage door behind us, that I was committing a betrayal.

  I felt that way all through the drive back to Peterhead, and through my last night visiting with Jane and little Jack and Alan. And next morning on my way back down to Aberdeen I drove deliberately along the coast, through Cruden Bay, to let the castle ruins know that I had not abandoned them.

  It didn’t take me long to settle things in France. I’d rented the house for the season, but the money didn’t matter, and the things that I’d had with me there didn’t fill two suitcases. My landlady, who wasn’t losing anything because I had already paid up front in full, still looked a bit put out until I told her I would probably be back before the winter’s end, to do more research up at the chateau. But I knew, as I was saying it, that I would not be back. There was no need.

  My characters had chosen not to come to life at Saint-Germain-en-Laye because their story wasn’t meant to happen there. They were supposed to be at Slains. And so was I.

  I’d never been so sure of anything as I was sure of that.

  On Tuesday night, the last night that I spent in France, I dreamt of Slains. I woke, still in my dream, to hear the roaring of the sea beneath my windows and the wind that raged against the walls until the air within the room bit cold against my skin. The fire was failing on the hearth, small licks of dying flame that cast half-hearted shadows on the floorboards and gave little light to see by.

  ‘Let it be,’ a man’s voice mumbled, low, against my neck. ‘We will have warmth enough.’ 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…

  It was so real. So real, in fact, that I was half-surprised to find myself alone in bed when I woke up on Wednesday morning. I lay blinking for a moment in the soft grey light, and then without waiting to switch on the lamp I reached out for the paper and pen that I kept at my bedside for moments like this, and I wrote down the scene. I wrote quickly, untidily, scratching out the dialogue before the voices of the dream began to fade. I’d learnt from hard experience that bits of plot that came to me this way, from my subconscious, often disappeared before they could be registered within my waking mind. I knew I couldn’t trust to memory.

  When I finally put the pen down, I sat still a moment, reading what I’d written. Here, again, it was a woman I was seeing, like the woman’s voice I’d heard when I was standing in the cottage. So far, all my major characters were men, but here this woman was, demanding to be part of things. Characters sometimes came into my books that way, unplanned and unannounced, often unwanted. But maybe, I thought, I should let this one stay. Maybe Jane had been right to suggest that my story would be better told by someone other than Nathaniel Hooke, someone I created from my own imagination, who could link the scenes together by her presence.

  Besides, I found it easier to write about a woman. I knew what women did when they were on their own, and how they thought. Perhaps this dream last night was my subconscious telling me that what my novel really needed was a woman’s point of view.

  The character, I thought, wou
ld form herself; I only had to name her.

  Which was easier, as always, said than done.

  The names of characters defined them, and like clothing, either fitted them or not. I’d tried and tossed out several by the time I reached the Paris airport.

  On the plane to Aberdeen, I tried a more methodical approach, by taking out my notebook and dividing one page into two neat columns, and then listing every Scottish name I knew – for I’d decided she would have to be a Scot – and trying different combinations of the first names and the surnames in my search for one that worked.

  I’d gone a good way down the list before I noticed I’d become a source of interest to my seatmate. He’d been sleeping when I’d boarded, or at least he had been sitting with his head back and his eyes closed, and since I hadn’t really been in a mood to strike up a conversation on the plane anyway, I’d happily left him in peace. But now he was awake and sitting forward, with his dark head angled slightly so that he could see what I was writing. He was doing it discreetly enough, but when I glanced over he met my gaze cheerfully, not at all embarrassed he’d been caught, and with a nod at the paper said, ‘Choosing an alias, are ye?’

  Which settled the question of his nationality. I’d been thinking he might have been French, with his nearly black hair and good looks, but there was no mistaking the burr of his accent. He looked to be close to my age, and his smile was friendly, not flirting, so I smiled back. ‘Nothing so exciting. I’m naming a character.’

  ‘Oh, aye? So you’re a writer? Should I know you?’

  ‘Do you read historical fiction?’

  ‘Not since I left school, no.’

  ‘Then you likely wouldn’t know me.’ Holding out my hand, I told him, ‘Carolyn McClelland.’