Sophia's Secret

by Susanna Kearsley

  I didn’t like repeating scenes, and so I hadn’t put them on the beach again, although I sensed they’d been there. I could see them in my mind’s eye with such certainty, and always in the same spot, that when I woke up one morning, restless, earlier than usual at nine o’clock instead of noon, I took my jacket from its peg and went to see if I could find the place.

  I hadn’t been outside in days. My eyes were unaccustomed to the light, and I felt cold despite my heavy sweater. But my mind, fixed firmly on the past, ignored these things. There were still dunes that ran above the beach, but not in the same places they had been three hundred years ago. The sands had blown, and shifted, and the tides had come to claim them, and left little I could use to judge position by. But inland, there were hills I found familiar.

  I was studying the nearest of them when a blur of brown and white streaked past me, snatched a rolling bit of yellow from the sand, and sharply wheeled to change its running course and come and pounce on me, with muddy feet and wagging tail.

  I had stiffened at the sight of him. He’d caught me unprepared. I’d known that Graham would be back to visit Jimmy, but I’d hoped I could avoid him. And the way that we had left things, I’d been sure that he would be avoiding me.

  The spaniel nudged my knee with an insistent nose.

  ‘Hi, Angus.’ Reaching down, I gave his ears a scratch and took the tennis ball he offered me and threw it out again for him as far as I could throw. As he dashed happily away in close pursuit, the voice that I’d been bracing for spoke, coming up behind me.

  ‘Good, you’re up. We were just coming to collect you.’

  His tone, I thought, was so damned normal, as though he’d forgotten what he’d told me at his father’s. I turned my head and looked at him as though he were insane.

  He’d been starting to say something else, but when he saw my face he stopped, as someone does who’s put a foot down on uncertain ground. ‘Are you all right?’

  The dog was back. I turned again to take the ball and throw it out along the beach for Angus, grateful to have some excuse to look away from Graham’s steady gaze. I shook my head and bit my tongue to keep from saying something I’d regret. And then I calmed my temper and said, ‘Look, just let it go, OK? If you don’t want to see me anymore, that’s fine. I understand.’

  There was a pause, and then he came around to stand so that he filled my field of vision.

  ‘Who said,’ he asked, evenly, ‘I didn’t want to see you?’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘I did?’ Forehead creased, he shifted slightly as though needing space to concentrate, as though he’d just been handed something written down in code. ‘And when did I say that?’

  I was beginning to feel less than certain of the facts myself. ‘At your father’s, after lunch, remember?’

  ‘Not exactly, no.’

  ‘You said that Stuart was your brother.’

  ‘Aye?’ The word came slowly, prompting me to carry on.

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Stuart was behaving like himself on Sunday, meaning he was something of an arse. But he was doing it,’ said Graham, ‘to impress you, and I didn’t have the heart to knock him down for it. That’s what I thought I’d told you.’ With a step he closed the space between us, and he lifted one gloved hand to tip my face up so I wouldn’t look away. ‘What did ye think I meant?’

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell him, but his nearness had the power of a magnet on my brainwaves, and I couldn’t even phrase a decent sentence.

  Graham took a guess. ‘You thought that I was giving you the push, because of Stuie?’ There was disbelief in that, until I answered with a tiny nod.

  He grinned, then. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘I’m not so noble.’

  And he brought his mouth to mine, and kissed me hard to prove the point.

  It was a while before he let me go.

  The dog, by then, had given up on both of us, and trotted off some distance to explore along the ridge of dunes that edged the beach. Graham turned and, slinging one arm warm around my shoulder, set us strolling in the same direction.

  ‘So,’ he asked, ‘we’re good?’

  ‘You need to ask?’

  ‘I’m thinking, now, I’d best not be assuming anything.’

  ‘We’re good,’ I said. ‘But Stuart won’t—’

  ‘Just let me handle Stuie.’

  I decided I should mention, ‘He’s been giving everybody the impression that he tucks me in at night.’

  ‘Aye, so I’ve heard.’

  I glanced up quickly, but I wasn’t quick enough to catch the smile. He said, ‘I ken my brother, Carrie. He’ll not be a problem. Give it time.’ He drew me closer to his side, and changed the subject. ‘So, if you weren’t out here waiting for me, what brought you down to the beach?’

  ‘I was getting a feel for the setting,’ I said. ‘For a scene I’ve been writing.’

  I looked at the dunes, and the rough waving grass, and the clifftops beyond, and I had the strange feeling that something was missing, some part of the landscape I’d seen in my mind when I’d written the scenes between John and Sophia.

  I narrowed my eyes to the wind, as I tried to remember. ‘There used to be a rock, up there, didn’t there? A big grey rock?’

  Turning his head, he looked down at me, curious. ‘How did ye know that?’

  I didn’t want to tell him I’d inherited the memory of its being there. ‘Dr Weir loaned me some of his old photos…’

  ‘Aye, they’d have had to be old,’ he said, drily. ‘That stone’s not been there since the 1700s.’

  ‘It must have been a drawing, then. I just remember seeing some view of this shoreline with a big rock, just up there.’

  ‘Aye, the grey stone of Ardendraught. It used to lie in that field, up at Aulton farm,’ he said, pointing out a spot above the far curve of the beach. ‘A great granite boulder, so large that the sailors at sea steered their course by it.’

  ‘Where did it go?’ I asked, gazing upwards at the empty hillside.

  Graham smiled at me, and whistled for the dog. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’

  The ancient church sat in its own little hollow of trees, with bare farmland rising all round and no neighbours except for a plain-looking house and a grander home built of red granite that stood on the opposite side of the narrow curved road, which was edged by the high granite wall of the kirkyard so closely that Graham had to park the car a short way down, beside a little bridge.

  He wound the windows down a bit for Angus, who looked weary from his run along the beach and seemed content to lie back, uncomplaining, while we left him there to walk back up the winding road.

  It was a peaceful place. There was no sound of traffic, only birds, as Graham swung the painted green gate open and stood back so I could go ahead of him into the quiet kirkyard.

  The church was graceful, built with rounded towers at each side, with pointed tops that made it look a lot like the old pictures I had seen of the Victorian façade of Slains. Around the church and out behind, the standing headstones stretched in ordered ranks though some were old and weathered, spotted white with lichen, and some leant, and some had fallen altogether with their age and had been taken up and propped against the inside of the kirkyard wall.

  The setting was familiar, and yet somehow wrong.

  Behind my shoulder, Graham said, ‘This entire church was built out of that one great stone of Ardendraught, which gives you some idea of the size of it.’

  It also explained why I hadn’t recognised it, I thought. The stone had still been on the hill overlooking the shore, when Sophia and Moray had walked there. It hadn’t been broken away yet by stonemasons’ hammers.

  ‘What year was the church built?’ I asked.

  ‘In 1776. There was a church here before that, but no one knows exactly where.’

  I could have told him where. I could have traced the outline of its walls beneath the present ones. Instead, I stood in silent t
hought while Graham showed me some of the more interesting features of the parish church.

  I didn’t catch it all – I drifted in and out of daydreams, but a few things stuck. Like when he pointed out a marble slab that had been sent across the sea to mark the grave site of a Danish prince, killed in the battle that had given Cruden Bay its name in the eleventh century.

  ‘It means “the slaughter of the Danes”, does Cruden,’ Graham told me. ‘Cruden Water runs close by the battlefield.’

  I looked where he was looking, at the quiet stream that ran beneath the bridge where we had parked the car – a little unassuming one-arched bridge that struck a stronger chord within my memory when I viewed it from this angle.

  Curious, I asked, ‘Is that an old bridge?’

  ‘Aye. The Bishop’s Bridge. It would have been here at the time your book is set. You want to take a closer look?’

  I did, and so we left the quiet of the kirkyard and walked the winding road that made a narrow S-curve at the bridge itself. It wasn’t more than ten feet wide, with worn and crusted sides of stone that rose to Graham’s elbow height. The Cruden Water underneath was muddy brown and gently running, swirling into eddies that moved lazily along the reedy shore beneath the overhanging bare-branched trees.

  Graham stopped halfway across, leaning over the edge like a schoolboy to watch the water slipping into shadow underneath us. ‘It’s called the Bishop’s bridge for Bishop Drummond, since he was the one who had it built, although it wasn’t finished until 1697, two years after he was dead. He retired up to Slains,’ he offered.

  But that would have been before the time I needed. Bishop Drummond would have died more than ten years before Sophia had arrived. Besides, there wasn’t anything about his name that rang a bell for me. Another name was rising in my mind, and with it came a hazy image of a kind-faced man with weary eyes.

  I asked, ‘Was there a Bishop Dunbar?’ When I spoke the name I knew that it was right, somehow. I knew it before Graham answered, ‘William Dunbar, aye. He was the minister of Cruden at the time of the ’08.’ The look he angled down at me appeared to be acknowledging the thoroughness of my research. ‘By all accounts, he was well-liked. It caused a bit of a stir when the Church forced him out of the parish.’

  ‘Why did they do that?’

  ‘He was Episcopalian, as was Drummond before him, and as were your Errolls at Slains. If you lean over here, in fact, you can still see what’s left of the Earl of Erroll’s coat of arms, carved in the side of the bridge. See that square?’

  I leant over as far as I dared, and Graham kept a safe hold on my shoulder, and I saw the square he meant, although the carving was so worn inside I couldn’t see the detail. I was about to say so when the movement of the water underneath me stirred a sudden memory of a different stream, a different bridge, and something that had happened…

  Damn the Bishop, Moray’s voice said calmly, and I tried to catch the rest of it, but Graham pulled me back. When I was standing upright once again he asked me, ‘D’ye deal with that, then, in your book? The religious divisions?’

  It took me a moment to bring my thoughts back, but my voice sounded normal when I said, ‘They’re there, yes. They have to be.’

  ‘Most of my students, when they’re coming new to my lectures, don’t realise how much of an issue it was,’ Graham said. ‘How much fighting went on because somebody read from the wrong prayerbook. If you and I had lived back then, and you’d been Presbyterian and I Episcopalian, we’d not have stood together on this bridge.’

  I wasn’t sure of that myself. The fear of hellfire and damnation notwithstanding, I’d have lain odds that the eighteenth-century version of myself would have had the same weakness for Graham’s grey eyes.

  The hard stone of the bridge had passed its chill into my fingers, so I hugged them to my chest. ‘I am, actually.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Presbyterian.’

  He smiled at that. ‘We call it Church of Scotland here. And so am I.’

  ‘So we’re all right to stand on the same bridge, then.’

  ‘Aye.’ His glance was warming. ‘I suppose we are.’ He looked me over. ‘Are you cold?’

  ‘Not really. Just my hands.’

  ‘You should have said so. Here, take these.’ And tugging off his gloves, he passed them over.

  I looked at them, remembering how Moray, in my book, had made a gesture much the same when he’d gone riding with Sophia that first time. And putting on the gloves, I found, as she had found, that they were warm, and overlarge, and rough upon my fingers, and the feeling had a certain sinful pleasure to it, as though Graham’s hands had closed around my own.

  ‘Better?’ he asked.

  Wordlessly I nodded, struck again by all the little intersecting points between the world that I’d created and the world that really was.

  He said, ‘You look half frozen. Want to get a cup of coffee?’

  My thoughts were with Sophia still, and Moray, and the moment when he’d asked her to go riding, and she’d known that she was standing at a crossroads of a kind, and that her answer made a difference to the way that she would go. I could have simply told him yes, and we’d have found a place somewhere to stop and buy a cup of coffee on our way back down to Cruden Bay. But like Sophia, I decided that the time had come to choose the unknown path.

  And so I told him, ‘I have coffee at the cottage. I could make you some.’

  He stood there for a moment looking down at me, considering.

  ‘All right,’ he said, and straightened from the bridge, and held his hand to me, and smiled when I took it. And we left behind the little church that had once been the great grey stone of Ardendraught above the windblown shore, and in whose shadow other lovers, not so different from ourselves, had moved in step three centuries before.

  IX

  He was waiting for her on the beach.

  He’d stretched himself full length upon the sand, boots crossed, arms folded underneath his head, and when she came around the grassy dune she nearly fell upon him.

  ‘Faith!’ she said, and laughed, and let him pull her down to rest beside him.

  In a lazy voice he said, ‘You’re late.’

  ‘The countess wanted my opinion on a newly published tract that she has lately finished reading, on the Union.’

  Moray’s mouth curved. ‘She’s a rare sort of woman, her ladyship.’

  Sophia agreed. She had never known a woman as intelligent, or capable, or fearless, as the Countess of Erroll. ‘I do not like deceiving her.’

  He rolled his head upon his arms to look at her. ‘We’ve little choice.’

  ‘I know.’ She looked down, sifting the warm sand between her fingers.

  ‘She thinks only of your happiness,’ he said, ‘and to her mind an outlawed soldier who must soon return to France, and to the battlefield, would hardly be as suitable a match as…well, the commodore, let’s say, of our Scots navy.’

  ‘British navy, now,’ she absently reminded him, not liking to imagine him at war. ‘And though she favours Captain Gordon, I do not.’

  His smile flashed as he settled back again, eyes closed. ‘And glad I am to hear it. It would pain me to discover that I’d wasted so much effort on a lass for naught.’

  Playfully, she struck him on his chest. ‘And am I so much effort, then?’

  ‘In ways ye can’t imagine.’ He was teasing still, but when his eyes came open to her own she saw the warmth in them, and knew what he intended even as his hand reached up to weave itself into her hair and draw her down. His kiss yet had the power to stop her breath, though she’d grown used to it by now and had the knowledge to return it.

  When it ended, Moray slid his arm around her back to keep her close against him, and she rested with her cheek against the fine weave of his shirtfront, with his heartbeat sounding strongly at her ear. Above, a gull was hanging on the wind, its outspread wings appearing not to move at all. Its solitary shadow chased across the sand besi
de them.

  Theirs was stolen time, Sophia knew. It could not last. She had not wished to think of it, herself, but since he’d raised the issue, she asked, ‘Will you leave soon, do you think?’

  His shoulder moved a little in a shrug. ‘By his last letter, Hooke will be already on the road to Slains, and Captain Ligondez of our French frigate was instructed to keep off the coast three weeks and then return, which means he, too, can be expected any day.’

  ‘And then you will be gone.’

  He did not answer her. He held her closer, and Sophia, saying nothing, closed her eyes and tried to hold the moment. She was used to losing those she loved, she told herself. She knew that when he’d gone the sun would rise and set as it had done before, and she would wake and live and sleep in rhythm with its passing. But this loss, coming forewarned as it did, evoked a different kind of sadness, and she knew that it would leave a mark upon her very different from the rest.

  He shifted underneath her. ‘What is that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That.’ His hand moved to her throat, and lower, till it felt the small, hard object pressing at the fabric of her gown. His fingers found the cord strung round her neck, and slipped beneath it to draw forth the makeshift necklace. She had lifted up her head to watch him, and she saw the change of his expression as he studied the small pebble, gleaming black, warmed by its closeness to her skin. She’d found a leather lace to string it with, and wore it tucked well underneath her bodice, where no one would chance to see it.

  He seemed about to say something, then thought the better of it, and asked lightly, ‘Does it work, I wonder?’

  ‘It well might,’ Sophia told him, holding up her hand as evidence. ‘This afternoon has been the first time I can yet recall that I’ve not pricked myself to pieces at my needlework.’

  He caught her fingers lightly, turned them as if to examine them, then flattened his own hand to hers, as if to test the difference in their sizes. She could feel the pressing coolness of the ring he always wore on the last finger of his right hand – a heavy square of silver with a red stone at its centre, on a plain, broad silver band. It had been, he had told her once, his father’s ring, a small piece of his family he could carry with him in a foreign land.