Sophia's Secret

by Susanna Kearsley

  ‘Insecurities,’ she said again.

  ‘I can’t help it.’ It came with the job – all the time that I spent on my own, with that blank stack of paper I had to turn into a book. Sometimes I felt like the girl in the fairy tale Rumplestiltskin, locked up and told to spin straw into gold. ‘I’m never sure,’ I said, ‘if I can pull it off.’

  ‘But you always do,’ Jane pointed out. ‘And brilliantly.’

  ‘Well, thank you.’

  ‘All you need is a break. I could take you to lunch.’

  ‘That’s all right, we don’t have to go out. I can make you a sandwich.’

  She looked round. ‘With what?’

  I hadn’t realised, till I looked around myself, that I had nearly used up the supplies that Jimmy Keith had stocked my kitchen with. I was down to three slices of bread and an egg. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I guess I need to do some shopping.’

  ‘We can do that,’ said Jane, ‘on our way back from lunch.’

  After lunch, though, I managed to talk her into walking up to Slains with me, again. We went from the village this time, by the footpath that led from Main Street. It took us through a wood of tangled trees behind Ward Hill, where a small and quiet stream ran through a gully to the sea. The footpath crossed the stream by way of a flat bridge, then climbed the further hill that changed from coarse, shrub-covered ground into a proper cliff as we came up above the level of the trees. Another steep turn and we stood at the top, with the sea far below us and Slains in our sights. The walk here wasn’t difficult, as coast paths went, but it was slippery in spots, and twice Jane nearly lost her footing near the edge.

  ‘You are not,’ she said, emphatically, ‘to come up here alone.’

  ‘You sound exactly like my mother.’

  ‘She’s a sensible woman, your mother. I mean, look at this, will you? What kind of a madman builds his home right at the edge of a cliff?’

  ‘The kind of a madman who likes good defences.’

  ‘But they’re not such good defences, really, are they? If your enemies came overland, they’d have you trapped. There’d be nowhere to go.’ She glanced down again at the foaming sea striking the rocks far below, and I could see that it affected her. I hadn’t expected that she would be bothered by heights. After all, she’d flown with Alan, and the two of them were known to do some crazy things on holidays, like climbing into caves and parasailing in the Amazon.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m fine.’ But she did not look down again.

  I felt completely in my element, myself. I liked the sea sounds and the crisp wind in my face, and my feet placed themselves with confidence upon the path, as though they felt quite certain of the way.

  There were no other footprints ahead of our own, and no tracks of a dog in the soft, muddy places. Which wasn’t too surprising, since it stood to reason that the man I’d run into that first day in the parking lot, the man I’d asked directions of, could hardly spend his whole day, every day, up here. He might not even be a local man. I hadn’t seen him round the town – and, for no reason other than the fact I’d liked his smile, I had been looking.

  I was looking for him now, but when he wasn’t at the top, I took care not to show my disappointment. Jane didn’t miss much, and she always had been quick to take an interest any time I took an interest in a man. I didn’t want her asking questions. After all, there wasn’t anything for me to say, I’d only met him once. I didn’t even know his name.

  Jane asked me, ‘What’s the sigh for?’

  ‘Did I sigh?’

  ‘With feeling.’

  ‘Well, just look at this,’ I said, and spread my hands wide to the view. ‘It’s all so beautiful.’

  The ruins felt much lonelier this afternoon, with us the only visitors. The wind wept round the high pink granite walls and followed when we walked along the grassy floors of what had once been corridors. I had wanted to see if, from what still remained, I could make out the floor plan, and Jane, her equilibrium restored now that we’d stepped a little further from the edge, was keen to join me in the game.

  ‘I think,’ she said, ‘this might have been the kitchen. Here’s a bit of chimney stack, and look at the size of that hearth.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I walked further along. ‘I think maybe the kitchen was somewhere down here, near the stables.’

  ‘And what makes you think those are stables?’

  She wasn’t convinced, and I knew I was letting the house I’d imagined last night, when I’d written the scenes of Sophia at Slains, shape my judgement of where things should be. There was nothing at all at this end of the house to suggest what the rooms might have been – only roofless rectangular spaces with crumbling walls, nothing more. But I still spent a happy few minutes meandering round, playing at fitting my made-up rooms onto the real ones.

  Sophia’s bedchamber, I thought, could be within that tall square tower standing proudly at the corner of the castle’s front, against the cliffs. I couldn’t see a way to get inside it, but my mind could fill the details in, and guess at what the views might be. And down there, at the end of this long corridor with all the doors, could be the castle’s dining room, and this, I thought as I stepped through a narrow arching door into the soaring room I’d liked so much my first time here, the one where I had seen the tracks of man and dog and where the gaping window gave a wide view of the sea, this surely must have been the drawing room. Well, under the drawing room, actually, since I was standing in what would have been the lower level of the house, the floorless main rooms being all above me, but the view would be the same from the great window I saw higher up the wall. A person could have stood there and looked out towards the east along the glinting path of sunlight on the waves to the horizon.

  I was gazing out that way myself, when Jane came up to join me.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  I turned, uncomprehending. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘What’s so interesting?’

  ‘Oh. Nothing. I’m just looking.’ But I brought my head back round again and stared a moment longer at the line where sea met sky, as though I needed to be sure, now that she mentioned it, that there was nothing there.

  Jane left just after two o’clock, and I went into Cruden Bay to get some food for supper. I’d never much liked shopping in the larger modern grocery stores, it took too much time to find anything, so I was delighted when I found a little corner shop on Main Street. I didn’t need much – just some apples and a pork chop and another loaf of bread. The man who kept the shop was friendly, and because my face was new to him, he asked me where I came from. We were deep in a discussion about Canada and hockey when the shop’s door jangled open and the wind blew Jimmy Keith in.

  ‘Aye-aye.’ He looked happy. ‘I’ve been lookin fer ye.’

  I said, ‘You have?’

  ‘Oh, aye. I was up tae the St Olaf Hotel yestereen, and I found some folk tae help ye wi’ yer book. I’ve made a wee list.’

  His ‘wee list’ appeared to have at least a half a dozen names. He read them off and told me who they were, although I couldn’t keep them straight. I wasn’t sure whether the schoolteacher or the plumber had offered to give me a driving tour of the district. But I did take note of one name.

  ‘Dr Weir,’ said Jimmy, last of all, ‘taks a rare interest in the local history. He’s a gran man. He’s aye fightin tae save Slains. He’ll be at hame the nicht, if ye’ve a mind tae wander ower there and spik wi’ him.’

  ‘I’d like that very much. Thanks.’

  ‘He’s got hissel a bungalow up by the Castle Wood. I’ll tell ye the wye, it’s nae bother tae find.’

  I walked out after supper. The dark had settled in, and on the path down from my cottage to the road the strange, uneasy feeling gripped me once again, although there was no one and nothing there that could have threatened me. I shook it off and made my legs move faster, but it followed, like an unseen force that chased me to the road, and then retreated into darkness, w
aiting…knowing it would have another chance at me, tonight, when I came home.

  Chapter Six

  The Castle Wood stood not far up past the Kilmarnock Arms. I’d gone through it that first day when I had been driving to Jane’s, and by daylight had thought it a peaceful place, but in the dark it was different, and I was grateful that I could pass by it tonight on the far side of the road. There were masses of rooks wheeling noisily over the treetops, their harsh cries unnerving. And the tall trees themselves with their strange gnarled branches looked twisted and weird, like the wolf-and witch-concealing forests in the illustrations of my old book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

  Dr Weir’s house was a welcome sight – a neat, low bungalow, with wind chimes hung beside the door and a family of small painted gnomes peering up from the tidy front garden.

  I was clearly expected. I barely had to knock before the door was opened to me. Dr Weir looked like a gnome himself: not tall, moon-faced, with round, old-fashioned spectacles. I couldn’t judge his age. His hair was white, but his complexion had a healthy, ruddy smoothness, and the eyes behind the spectacles were clear and sharp. He’d been a surgeon, Jimmy had explained, and had just recently retired.

  ‘Come in,’ he said, ‘come in.’ He took my coat and shook the dampness from it, hanging it with care upon the antique mirrored hall tree. I could see, in every corner of the entryway, the evidence of good taste and a love of timeworn things. There was no clutter, but the fading prints hung on the wall, the Persian carpet runner on the floor, and the soft light from old glass sconces on the walls, all lent the space an atmosphere of permanence and comfort.

  And that atmosphere was stronger in the narrow, lamplit study that he showed me to. One wall was lined from floor to ceiling with glass-fronted bookcases, their shelves packed tight with volumes old and new, hardback and paperback. And where he had run out of room to stand a book up properly on edge, he’d laid it horizontally across the top of its companions and stacked others over that, so there were books wedged in wherever there was space. It had the same effect on me as the sight of a toy shop would have on a six-year-old.

  But because I didn’t want to seem like a six-year-old, I held in my enthusiasm and let him introduce me to his wife, who had been sitting in a chintz-upholstered chair, one of a pair that flanked a small round table at the narrow end wall. Behind these, a fall of striped, pinch-pleated curtains had been drawn across the room’s one window, shutting darkness out and keeping in the warm glow of the reading lamps. A leather wing chair with a smoking table at its side completed the room’s furnishings, and on the wall that didn’t have the bookcases, a handful of seascapes and nautical prints caught the light in the glass of their frames.

  The doctor’s wife, Elsie, was compact like him, and white-haired, but not round in the slightest. More a fairy than a gnome, I thought. Her blue eyes seemed to dance. ‘We were about to have our evening whisky,’ she informed me. ‘Will you join us? Or perhaps you’d like some tea?’

  I told her whisky would be fine.

  Because the wing chair was so obviously the doctor’s, I took the other chintz-covered chair, angled with the bookcases to my one shoulder and the curtains of the window to my other, and the small round table set between myself and Elsie Weir.

  Dr Weir stepped out a moment, and returned with three large tumblers of heavy cut glass, each a third of the way filled with rich amber whisky. He handed mine to me. ‘So, Jimmy said you were a writer. Historical fiction, is that right?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’m that ashamed to say I didn’t recognise your name.’

  Elsie smiled. ‘He’s a typical man. Never picks up a book if the writer’s a woman. He always expects it to end with a kiss.’

  ‘Well, mine usually do,’ I admitted. I tasted my whisky, and let the sharp warmth sear a path to my stomach. I loved the pure taste of a single malt Scotch, but I had to consume it in small, measured sips, or it did me in quickly. ‘The book that I’m working on now has to do with the French and the Jacobites trying to bring James VIII back to Scotland, in 1708.’

  ‘Does it, now?’ He had lifted his eyebrows. ‘That’s a lesser-known skirmish. What made you choose that one?’

  I wasn’t sure myself. The main ideas for my novels never struck me like a lightning bolt. They formed themselves in stages, like a snowball packed in layers, with clumps padded on here and lumps scraped away there, till the whole thing was rounded and perfect. But by then, I could no longer see the shape of that first handful I’d scooped up, that first small thought that had begun the process.

  I tried to think of what had started this one.

  I’d been working on my last book, which was set in Spain, and, needing to find out some minor detail about eighteenth-century hospitals, I’d come across the memoirs of a doctor who had lived in France about the time I needed. That doctor had done surgery on Louis XIV – the Sun King – and had been so proud of it that he’d written several detailed pages on the incident. And that had got me interested in Louis XIV.

  I’d started reading up on him, and on his court and all its goings-on. For pleasure, nothing more. And then one night I’d turned my television on to catch the news and got the channel wrong and tuned in an old movie – Errol Flynn in ‘Captain Blood’ – and because I’d always had a thing for Errol Flynn I’d watched him instead, enjoying the swordfights and the romance and the swashbuckling, and at the end he’d leapt onto the foredeck of his ship and told his fellow pirates they could all return to England, now that bad King James had fled to France and good King William ruled the country.

  And that had set me thinking, idly, of what rotten luck the Stewart kings had suffered, King James in particular, and how it must have felt for him to lose the crown, give up his throne, and have to live in exile.

  And, still thinking this, I’d turned the television off and opened up the book that I’d been reading, a biography of Louis XIV, and on the page where I’d left off there’d been a mention of the palace, Saint-Germain, that Louis had loaned to the Stewart kings in exile, so they still could keep a royal court. Intrigued, I’d started reading up on that – on all the Scottish nobles coming in and out of Saint-Germain, and all the plotting that went on. I’d found it all so fascinating.

  Shortly after that, I’d found the papers by Nathaniel Hooke, and learnt about his dream of a rebellion, and…

  It was, I knew, a convoluted explanation, and most people who asked where I got my ideas were looking for a shorter answer, so I said to Dr Weir that I had picked the 1708 rebellion just because, ‘I liked Nathaniel Hooke.’

  ‘Ah, Hooke.’ The doctor nodded. ‘He’s an interesting character. An Irishman, though, not a Scot. You knew that? Yes, he came to Slains on two occasions, I believe. The first in 1705, to gauge support among the nobles for his plan to bring the young king back, and then again in 1707, to set everything in motion.’

  ‘I’m just dealing with the second visit, really. And the actual attempt at the invasion, the next winter.’ I settled back and took another careful sip of whisky, and explained how, since I’d started writing my book from the French side of things, I needed to fill in some gaps on my knowledge of Slains. ‘Jimmy said you knew a lot about the castle.’

  ‘That I do.’

  ‘It’s his pet subject,’ Elsie told me, with a fond, indulgent smile. ‘I hope you’ve nothing else to do, this evening.’

  Dr Weir, ignoring her, said, ‘What, specifically, were you wanting to know?’

  ‘Whatever you can tell me.’ I had learnt from years of doing research not to put restrictions on the things that people told me and although he’d likely touch on things I’d read about already, I’d learn more from him if I just let him talk, and kept my own mouth shut.

  He started with the history of the Hays, the Earls of Erroll, who had built Slains. ‘It’s an old and noble family. There’s a legend told about the Hays, you know, that in the ancient days an ancestor of theirs was ploughing a field with h
is two sons, in sight of a battlefield on which the Danes were destroying the Scots forces. And, says the legend, when one of the Scots lines began to break up and retreat, well, this farmer – a large man, with powerful arms – snatched the yoke from his oxen to use as a weapon, and called to his sons, and together the three of them herded the Scots soldiers back into battle and reformed the line, and the Danes, in the end, were defeated. The king then took the farmer and his sons to Perth, and let a falcon off from Kinnoull Hill, and said that all the land the falcon flew over was to be theirs. And the bird flew to a stone, still called the Hawk’s Stone, in St Madoes Parish, so then the farmer was master of some of the finest lands north of the Tay, and a man of great wealth.

  ‘It’s no more than a tale, mind, and there’s nothing written down to give it proof, but to this day the Chiefs of Hay still carry as their coat of arms the king’s falcon, and the ox-yoke, and three bloodstained shields, one each for that brave farmer and his sons. And the family’s motto, translated, means “Keep the Yoke”. So they believe it, anyway.’

  He paused, because he’d noticed that I’d taken out my notebook and was writing down the legend, and he gave me time to finish.

  ‘Do you have all that?’ he asked me. ‘Good. I’ll try to go more slowly for you. Now, about the Hays. They came from Normandy, according to the history books. They were raised to the title of earls in the mid-fifteenth century, and fully a hundred years before that, they’d been made Lord High Constables of Scotland by Robert the Bruce himself. That’s an influential office, Lord High Constable, and a hereditary one, passed down the family through the generations, along with a fierce devotion to the Catholic cause.

  ‘They supported Mary, Queen of Scots’ son, James VI, till James decided to turn Protestant. That was too much for the 9th Earl of Erroll, and he led a mounted attack on the king’s forces. Got himself an arrow wound for his efforts, as I recall. And he made King James so angry that the king marched north personally to sack the Earl of Erroll’s castles at Delgatie and Old Slains, just south of here. Destroyed them both with gunpowder and cannon. The Earl of Erroll spent a few years biding time in exile, then came back to Scotland, and, instead of trying to rebuild Old Slains, decided to build anew, around a tower house the Hays kept here. So then he called this New Slains.